‘Sunday morning stables’ being one of his favourite ceremonies, the
Colonel now led us from one loose-box to another, commenting affectionately
on each inmate, and stimulated by the fact that one of his audience was a stranger. Each of them, apparently, was a compendium of unique
equine qualities, on which I gazed with unaffected admiration, while Stephen chimed in with
“Never seen the old chestnut looking so fit, Colonel,” or “Looking an absolute
picture,” while Dumbrell was deferentially at hand
all the time to share the encomiums offered to his charges. The Colonel, of course, had a
stock of repertory
remarks about how each one of them, including how they
had won a
certain point-to-point or (more frequently) why
they hadn’t.
The last
one we looked at was a big,
well-bred brown horse who stood very much ‘over
at the knees.’ The Colonel had hunted him twelve seasons and he
had an equivalently long
rigmarole to recite about him, beginning with “I remember Sam Hames saying to me—(I
bought him off old Hames of Leicester, you know)—that horse is the most natural jumper I’ve ever had in my
stable. And he was right, for the old horse has
only given me one bad
toss in twelve years, and that was no fault of his own, for he landed on a stump of a willow tree; it was
at that rough fence just outside Clout’s
Wood—nasty place too—you remember I showed it you the other day, Steve;” all of which Stephen had
probably heard fifty
times before, and had been shown the ‘nasty place’ half a dozen times into the bargain. It was only when he heard the distant booming of the luncheon-gong that
the Colonel was able to tear
himself away from the brown horse’s loose-box.
Upper: Glyn Warren Philpot, Portrait of Siegfried Sassoon, 1917.
Center: John Frederick Herring, Sr. (1795-1865), A Bay Hunter In A Loose
Box, date unknown.
Lower: Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man, 1928.
