and horse-breeders, Lord
Palmerston, the two ex-masters of the Royal Buckhounds, Earls Granville
and Bessborough, the Marquis of Stafford, Vice-President of the
Four-Horse Driving Club, and the Honourable Admiral Rous, the leading
authority of the Jockey Club on all racing matters. The favourable
report of these, perhaps, among the most competent judges of anything
appertaining to horses in the world, settled the value of Mr. Rarey's
lessons, and the list began to fill speedily; many of the subscribers,
no doubt, being more influenced by the prevailing fashion and curiosity,
than by an inclination to turn horse-tamers.

But early in April, when it became known that Mr. Rarey had tamed
Cruiser,[20-*] the most vicious stallion in England, "who could do more
fighting in less time than any horse in the world," and that he had
brought him to London on the very day after, that he first backed him
and had ridden him within three hours after the first interview, slow
conviction swelled to enthusiasm. The list filled up rapidly.

The school in Kinnerton Street, to which Mr. Rarey was obliged to
remove, was crowded, the excitement increasing with each lesson. On the
day that Cruiser was exhibited for the first time, long before the doors
were open, the little back street was filled with a fashionable mob,
including ladies of the highest rank. An admission by noble
non-subscribers with notes, gold, and cheques in hands, was begged for
with a polite insinuating humility that was quite edifying. A hatful of
ten-guinea subscriptions was thrust upon the unwilling secretary at the
door with as much eagerness as if he had been the allotter of shares in
a ten per cent railway in the day of Hudsonian guarantees. And it must
be observed that this crowd included among the mere fashion-mongers
almost every distinguished horseman and hunting-man in the three
kingdoms.

It is quite too late now to attempt to depreciate a system the value of
which has been repeatedly and openly acknowledged by authorities above
question. As to the "secret," the subscribers must have known that it
was impossible that a system that required so much space, and involved
so much noise, could long remain a secret.

The Earl of Jersey, so celebrated in this century as a breeder of
race-horses, in the last century as a rider to hounds, _stood_ through
a long lesson, and was as much delighted as his son the Honourable
Frederick Villiers, Master of the Pytchley Hound