These roadside hacks had qualities not found
in these days of Macadam and railroads, because
not wanted. They were for the most part
between fourteen and fifteen hands high. A tall
horse is neither handy to mount nor likely to
last through a long day. They were strong,
for they had to carry, over and above the horseman
with his large cloak and jack-boots, a
heavy saddle with holsters, pistols, and saddle-
bags. They were tolerably swift, for the rider
might have to owe his safety to his pace. They
had good shoulders and plenty before the pummel,
capital legs and feet; they were hardy
enough in constitution to bear rough weather,
indifferent stables, and coarse fodder. They were
required to carry their riders, not for an hour
or two now and then, for exercise or fashion's
sake, but for long days, day after day, and that
with an easy elastic walk, trot, or canter.
According to a rule as old as time, the demand
created the supply, and men of fortune were
always willing to buy at long prices a handsome,
sure-footed, easy-going, enduring hackney, while
less fortunate travellers put up with every
degree of utility with more or less of comfort and
beauty, because they had no other way of
journeying.

After half a century of stage-coaches had
tempted most travellers on to wheels, came
railroads and destroyed the roadside inns, where
the horseman used to find a warm welcome after
a long hard day. On the great north road,
where twenty years ago the crack of the
postilion's whip and the blast of the guard's horn,
the rattling of hoofs and the jingling of pole-chains,
resounded night and day, you cannot
now make sure of a bed, a decent meal, or a
feed of corn. As for ostlers, the race is
extinct; if you choose to ride or drive, you must
bring your groom, or groom your horse
yourself.

This decay of inns renders impossible feats
performed by men of our own time, though
of the last generation. Old Dick Tattersall
used to have a relay of hacks on the road
between London and Grantham; used to mount,
after a day's work of auction at the extinct
Corner, ride down one hundred and eight
miles before morning, hunt the next day with
the Belvoir hounds, and return by the same
means to his duties. Sir Tatton Sykes, of
Sledmere, the last of the real squires, who was
satisfied to spend a large income at home on
hospitality, field sports, agriculture, and breeding
Leinster sheep and horses to win the Derby,
without troubling either the world of politics
or the world of fashion, had a way of travelling
(with as little baggage as Sir Charles Napier)
to Epsom to see the Derby run, or to an equal
distance to ride a race, that would now be
impossible. Wherever he slept the first night,
he borrowed next morning a clean shirt from
the landlord, and left his own to be washed
ready for his return. He repeated the operation
at each resting-place on the road, returning
by instalments each borrowed garment until
he arrived back at Sledmere in his own shirt.

A small valise carried the satin breeches
and silk stockings that replaced his leathers
and long boots in the evening. The operation
was ingenious, primitive, and clean; but in
1866 the landlords with frilled shirts have
followed the way of satin breeches, and are known
no more.

Enduring hacks of the old sort are now only
to be found in the hands of active farmers, who
look over hundreds of acres before breakfast,
and in the hands of country surgeons. They
are generally satisfied with anything useful that
will do their day's work—very different from
the time when a good roadster hackney was
worth as much as, and was more carefully
chosen than, the modern brougham horse.

In Australia you may find horses of English
breed that will travel their three hundred miles
in five days, and therein lies their principal merit;
for well-broken easy-going roadsters are rare
in that rapid, make-haste-to-be-rich country.
The Australian horse is an instrument of business,
not an instrument of pleasure.

Very different was England some thirty years
ago, when the tour on horseback was to be
enjoyed in perfection by the horseman whose
years, health, and spirits, could defy the damp
days, muddy roads, dark nights, and uncertain
inns, for the sake of independence, adventure,
and the abstract pleasure there is in riding a
good horse. "The gentleman was known by
his horse." He was not tied by a mile or two,
or an hour or two, and, well mounted, was not
afraid of getting a little wrong in trying a short
cut, or investigating a promising scene, a green
range of hills or ancient manor, buried in a park
of ancestral oaks. Country folk were wonderfully
kind and cheery to such a traveller;
stout farmers returning from market were
hospitably pressing (in the northern counties);
and squires, once assured the stranger was only
travelling for pleasure—not unfrequently the
adventure of Squire Western on his road to
London was repeated, a chance run with hounds
and a dinner with a stranger to follow—were
wonderfully kind. All through the counties
where, at war prices, moorland had been
enclosed, there were long slips of greensward
on either side of the highway, inviting a
canter in the morning, and affording pleasant
walking ground for the last tired mile or two.
Then there were many delightful short cuts
through bridle-roads across fords too deep
for wheels, and—by sufferance of lodge-
keepers, open to the blandishments of a
smile, a pleasant word, and a shilling—
through parks rich in turf, water, woodland,
game, and deer. Oh, those were delightful
days, when, young and full of life and hope
and romance, with a good horse, a sufficiently
well-filled purse, and more than one friend on the
round, we set out, not afraid of rheumatism, to
travel some two or three hundred miles with a
definite point to reach, but no particular day or
hour or route! In those days—it was before
these grisly whiskers of ours had made their
appearance, in spite of industrious shaving—the