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