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other, and its ends not so much in need of concealment. Unluckily, we shall not find just at this season--that is to say, in February--anything going on excepting a few steeple-chases--some "jumping business," as the English say rather contemptuously. In England there are certain owners, such as Lord Lonsdale, Captain Machell, Mr. Brayley and others, who, though well known in flat-races, have also good hunters in their stables, while the proprietors of the latter in France confine themselves exclusively to this specialty. Perhaps the best known amongst them are the baron Jules Finot and the marquis de St. Sauveur. Most of the members of the Jockey Club affect to look down upon the "illegitimate" sport, as they call it. It would seem, however, that this disdain is hardly justifiable, for as a spectacle at least a steeple-chase is certainly more dramatic and more interesting than a flat-race. What can be finer than the sight of a dozen gentlemen or jockeys, as the case may be, charging a brook and taking it clear in one unbroken line? And yet, despite the attractions and excitement of the sport, and all the efforts made from time to time by the Society of Steeple-chases to popularize it in France, it cannot as yet be called a success. Complaint is made, as in England, of too short distances, of the insufficiency of the obstacles, of an overstraining of the pace. The whole thing is coming to partake more and more of the nature of a race, an essentially different thing. Field sports are not races--at least they never ought to be. A steeple-chase can never answer the true purpose of the flat-race, which is to prove which is the best horse, to the end that he may ultimately reproduce his like. But nobody ever heard of "a sire calculated to get steeple-chasers". The cleverness and the special qualities that make a good steeple-chaser are not transmitted. The best have been horses of poor appearance, often small and unsightly, that have been given up by the trainer as incapable of winning in flat-races. In England the winners of the "Grand National" have had no pedigree to speak of, and have failed upon the track. Cassetete had run in nineteen races without gaining a single one before he began his remarkable career as a hunter; Alcibiade had been employed at Newmarket as a lad's horse; Salamander was taken out of a cart to win the great steeple-chases at Liverpool and Warwick. In France there is no Liverpool or Croydon or San
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