it may be supposed he had been Young Mat, but
he had been Old Mat now as long as most could recall. In all these
years, indeed, he had changed very little. He trained his horses to-day
at Putnam's, the farm in the village of Cuckmere, over the green billow
of the Downs, just as he had done in the beginning; and he trained the
same kind of horses in the same kind of way, which was entirely
different from that of other trainers.

Mat rarely had a good horse in his stable, and never a bad one. He kept
his horses in old barns and farm-stables, turning them out on to the
chalk Downs in all seasons of the year with little shelter but the lee
of a haystack or an occasional shed.

"I don't keep my hosses in no 'ot-house," he would say. "A hoss wants a
heart, not a hot-water bottle. He'll get it on the chalk, let him be."

But if his horses were rough, they stood up and they stayed.

And that was all he wanted: for Mat never trained anything but jumpers.

"Flat racin' for flats," was a favourite saying of his. "'Chasin' for
class."

And many of his wins have become historic; notably the Grand National in
the year of Sedan--when Merry Andrew, who had three legs and one lung,
so the story went, won for him by two lengths; and thirty years later
Cannibal's still more astounding victory in the same race, when Monkey
Brand out-jockeyed Chukkers Childers, the American crack, in one of the
most desperate set-to's in the annals of Aintree.

There is a famous caricature of Mat leading in the winner on the first
of these occasions. He looked then much as he does to-day--like
Humpty-Dumpty of the nursery ballad; but he grew always more
Humpty-Dumptyish with the years. His round red head, bald and shining,
sat like a poached egg between the enormous spread of his shoulders. His
neck, always short, grew shorter and finally disappeared; and his crisp,
pink face had the air of one who finds breathing a perpetually
increasing difficulty.

In build Mat was very short, and very broad; and his legs were so thin
that it was no wonder they were somewhat bowed beneath their load. Far
back in the Dark Ages, when his body was more on a par with his legs,
it was rumoured that Mat had himself won hunt-races.

"Then my body went on, or rayther spread out," he would tell his
intimates, "while me legs stayed where they was. So Mat become a trainer
'stead of a jockey."

And Mat's legs were not the only part of him that had stayed as they
were in