It would have required a worse temper than my hero's to be displeased with the good-natured zeal of his humble friend. But indeed, to say the truth, as he was to go, the appearance of the boots, I know not how, inspired him with a sort of confidence as to the result. They were tried, and although a thought too wide about the calves, yet were pronounced upon the whole admirable. Johnny had come provided against this contingency, and a few wisps of hay* judiciously disposed, steadied Harry sufficiently in his novel costume.

Meanwhile the breakfast bell had twice rung, and there was no time to be lost. Harry sallied out, accoutred as he was. Unluckily, he neglected to allow for the unusual appendage of spurs which dangled at his heels, and as he tripped hurriedly down stairs, he was precipitated head foremost down two flights, and did not cease rolling till he found himself in the centre of the astonished breakfast party!

Happily, he was more frightened than hurt; and with the exception of a sad rent in his new 66 tops," he had sustained no injury. He was very glad, notwithstanding, to escape as soon as possible from the merriment of the party, in order to join his friend Johnny at the stables, where he had agreed to mount before the rest of the party should have assembled.

Now I may as well let the reader into the secret by which Johnny Malone hoped, in a moment, to metamorphose his inexperienced friend into an accomplished horseman, who was 66 to show some of them the way, wid all their consate." It was simply by strapping the boots to the saddle. The rider thus secured at the centre of motion, Johnny concluded, that as long as the boots held their place, it would be impossible to fall; and by an ingenious arrangement, he had concealed the fastening under the tops of the boots, so as to escape even the closest observation.

All was arranged to his perfect satisfaction, and when our friend Harry himself got into the saddle, and had the straps secured at each knee, he felt a degree of confidence which he had by no means anticipated. His pride was touched by the contempt with which he had hitherto been treated, and he resolved, if possible, to alter the estimate which had been formed of his powers; nor was his disposition sweetened by the reception which he met, when, after passing muster at Johnny's hands, he joined the party on the road to the meet. Every portion of his equipments was severely criticised; from the head to the heel, nothing escaped his tormentors; and his rage and mortification were complete, when one of his urchin cousins so contrived it, that his poney

* The reader may remember the opening line of the well-known Connaught Epic. -"Billy O'Rourke."

"I cut my stick and foddhered my brogues”.

(as great an imp as himself) should pull out through the rent which the spur had made in the unlucky boot, a long mouthful of the hay, which poor Johnny had used for the purpose of supplying the defect of a calf upon Masther Harry's" leg!!

It was fortunate for our poor hero, that almost at the same moment, the stag was turned out, and the attention of his persecutors diverted to another object. The ordinary law was given-the dogs laid on; and though Brown Bess at the first note gave every indication of excitement, poor Harry was so confused by this consummation of his misfortunes, that he almost forgot the object for which they had met.

"Musha, tare-an-ages, Masther Harry, rouse yourself, and don't let them run away from you;" whispered a warning voice at his elbow. A significant glance, too, which he saw interchanged between two of his companions, ruffled his pride and recalled his recollection. He gathered up his reins, and reckless of consequences, let the gentle, but spirited mare take her own course.

They had a magnificent start, and Brown Bess held a capital place. I need not say that poor Harry was sadly pommelled about on his seat. Now flung forward-then driven back out of his saddle-at one moment on the point of swaying off to the right-the next, whirled back as suddenly to the left-yet he held his ground, notwithstanding all; and, to the amazement of every one, continued to keep the place into which, from the first, his mare had settled! He was himself not less amazed than the rest. But he had great faith in the top boots!

The first fields through which they passed, were of grass, with few and small fences. As long as this lasted, he was in the midst of the party, who had been amusing themselves at his expense, and who could hardly believe their eyes as they saw him alight safely after each successive jump. By degrees, however, as the country became more stiff, the field began to thin; and Harry, though hardly able to see, much less to think of what was going on, was left almost alone; his only companions being Joe Blake, and a few other veterans of the field. "Bravo, Harry!" shouted Joe, as they alighted together at the far side of a five foot wall, which Bess took in the true Roscommon style. Poor Harry was all but stunned in the process. He found himself first falling backwards as she rose to the leap, when again suddenly he was shot forward, with all the force of an eighteen pounder. This violence began to tell. The boots held their place well. But Johnny had forgotten to calculate that perhaps it might not be so easy to stick to the boots. Poor Harry began to find his hold very insecure. In the right boot (thanks to the mischievous pony) his foot was rattling about (to use the illustration of Johnny Malone) "like the churn-dash in an empty churn ;" and every moment added to his insecurity!

On they flew notwithstanding, and still our hero kept his place. At last, in crossing a tremendous double ditch, a sudden wrench dragged his right leg completely out of the boot in which it was encased; and he found himself now entirely dependant on his solitary remaining support. By some lucky chance, he still held on, nevertheless, and he had already far distanced his "consated" cousins. The dogs were now running in view, and everything appeared as if they should soon run down their game.

"Well done, Harry, my boy!" shouted Joe, once more, as they came to another awful wall. "Mind yourself now, in earnest !"

But alas! it was too much for poor Harry! With one tremendous crash, he was shot up in the saddle; out flew the left leg, which had still remained confined, and Harry, leaving his boots still attached to the saddle, was flung head-foremost, six yards into the next field! The boots, however, held their place, and as the spurs still dangled at the heel, Bess did not for a moment abate her pace, till she was first up at the taken!

Uncle Joe stopt to pick up poor Harry, for they were far in advance of all the rest. I will only add that he kept the secret honourably. Harry's character was from that day fully established; and none but Uncle Joe and Johnny Malone ever knew how much of his fame he owed to

HIS FIRST PAIR OF TOPS.

THE HISTORY OF COCK FIGHTING.

BY AN "OLD COCK."

a

TIME was, Mr. Editor, when the office of chronicler of the noble pastime of cocking would have been deemed too honourabie for humble hands like mine; when dukes and marquesses, and earls reckoned it among their choicest recreations, and grave societies of antiquarians devoted whole sessions to the examination of minute points in its history.* But alas, these joyous times are passed! We are now weak, and almost despised fraternity; if we can get a scanty column of a crowded weekly print to record our still lingering existence, it is accorded almost with a grudge; and it is not without heavy foreboding of the probability of failure, that I appeal to your generosity and toleration for a page or two in some quiet corner of your magazine, that I may console myself, and some of my desponding brotherhood, whose

* Witness the learned dissertation of Samuel Pegge, read before the Archæological Society of London Antiquaries, vol. III. pp. 122, and foll.

feelings I respect, by drawing a little upon the ancient history of our craft; and teaching them to forget in dreams of past glory, the consciousness of our present humiliation.

Few sports can claim a higher or more illustrious antiquity than that which I am still free to profess my favourite. I will not insist upon the theory which many antiquaries* maintain, that it was a quarrel over their cocks which led to the death of the son of Midas, by the hand of his brother Adrastus; for I have abundant materials in more certain history, wherefrom to establish the glory of my craft. Who does not remember the noble use to which, upon the eve of the decisive struggle for the independence of Greece, Themistocles turned a cock-fight exhibited in presence of his army?" If such," said he, "be the courage of these little animals in their paltry contest, what should be ours, whose lives, liberties, country, all are staked upon the issue?"

This remarkable event is supposed to have been the origin of the annual exhibition of cock-fighting, ever afterwards retained in Greece. The speech is by some ascribed to Miltiades; and others attribute the institution to the fact, that the cock is a native of Persia. But there are none who doubt but that its origin may claim at least this, if not a higher, antiquity in Greece.

Can any true lover of the sport be surprised that it soon became a favourite amusement, even to the exclusion of almost all the rest! Pliny relates that it was annually exhibited at Pergamos with as much regularity, and attended with as much eagerness, as the gladiatorial games. Eschines (like many a muddy-headed lawyer of our own time) makes it one of his charges against Timarchus-a truly classic sportsman-that he spent his days in a cock-pit.+ And Plato, whose profession led him to despise sport in all its forms, laments that the old and young alike, were infatuated by what he calls this "foolish" pursuit! It was even made a subject for the art of the painter and the statuary; and Buckmann mentions an amusing antique, in which a pair of cocks are fighting, while a mouse is running away with an ear of corn from under their nose!

And, lest it might be supposed that these exhibitions were left to ac cident, and the training of the cocks neglected, or considered of little importance, I may with safety say, that many of our modern" feeders" might, perhaps, glean some advantage from the hints which the ancient writers contain. Never did my Lord Derby labour with more zeal for the improvement of breeding, or apply with more assiduity to the mysteries of training, than did his prototypes of the olden times. They went to enormous expense in importing their birds from abroad; and,

* As Palmerius in his Exercitationes. + Opera p. 178, folio edition.

however it may be ridiculed by modern feeders, I have often been

tempted to try the drugs which they employed for the purpose of firing their spirit, or improving their wind. Among these I will only mention adiantum, a prescription of Pliny; and garlic, [okopodov] which Xenephon tells us was frequently used with great effect. Caution, however, was always necessary, as its effect was like that of opium, and, if administered too long before the battle, it had a depressing influence, the animal being thrown into the collapse when its operation subsided. I may mention, in passing to our "brethren of the whip," that garlic was administered to horses by the Greeks for a similar purpose, and with the same success.†

Nor did they leave the birds to their natural courage, even assisted by this artificial excitement. Clipping, lightening, trimming, and all the other arts, formed part of the science of the pit, then, as they do in modern times; and though Pegge seems to think that they used no spur, I have no hesitation in agreeing with Beckman, who maintains the opposite opinion. Indeed, Aristophanes is decisive upon this point in his "Birds."‡

Rome, if she did not borrow it from Greece, at least pursued the craft with the same energy. But the Romans employed quails, and even partridges, for the same purpose. It is true that the Greeks had quails also. But they seem to have used them only in a barbarous sport in which the trial of skill was, who should kill, by a throw of his stick, the greatest number of his adversary's birds. The Romans, on the contrary, had their systematic quail fights, as we have our cock fights.

We are not surprised to find Mark Anthony, who seems to have cultivated every sort of sport, an enthusiastic frequenter of the pit. But it is more worthy of notice, that even the sage Augustus did not think it beneath the dignity of the laws, to punish a scoundrel (for there have been scoundrels at all times) who had the barbarism to kill and eat the champion quail of his day! Even the stoical Alexander Severus took the utmost pleasure (as Lampridius tells) in being present at a main; and the sons of Septimius Severus, like many wild youths of later times, seem to have been constantly getting into some scrape or row in the cockpit, which they loved to frequent.

All this, however, refers but to the later times; for, in the early days of the republic, the cock fight was almost entirely unknown; the substitutes being, as I have already observed, quails and partridges, which fought with almost equal courage, and were in use in Cyprus even as late as the sixteenth century. §

The taste for this (I must say, despite our modern renegades)

* iv. 36. + Xenophon, Sympos, p. 648, fol. Edit.

Lusignan Histoire de Cypre, p. 221.

NO. XXII.-VOL. IV.-NEW SERIES.

Aves. v. 760.

2 G