"Let us look at him in his saddle. Does he not look like a
workman? Observe how lightly he sits! No one could suppose
him to be a twelve-stone man. And what a firm hand he has on
his horses! How well he puts them at their fences, and what
chances he gives them to extricate themselves from any scrape
they may have gotten into! He never hurries them then; no man
ever saw Tom Smith ride fast at his fences, at least at large
ones (brooks excepted), let the pace be what it may; and what
a treat it is to see him jump water! His falls, to be sure,
have been innumerable; but what very hard-riding man does not
get falls? Hundreds of Mr. Smith's falls may be accounted for:
he has measured his horses' pluck by his own, and ridden
at hundreds of non-feasible places, with the chance of getting
over them somehow."
Again: "No man," says Dick Christian, "that ever came into
Leicestershire could beat Mr. Smith--I do not care what any of them
say;" while "The Druid," in 'Silk and Scarlet,' after giving some very
interesting anecdotes of Tom Smith, says of him, "However hasty in
temper and action he might be in the field or on the flags, he was the
mightiest hunter that ever 'rode across Belvoir's sweet vale' or wore a
horn at his saddle-bow."
"His wonderful influence," he adds, "over his hunters was
strongly exemplified at another time, but in rather a different
manner. He had mounted a friend, who complained of having
nothing to ride, on his celebrated horse Cicero. The hounds
were running breast-high across the big pasture lands of
Leicestershire, and Cicero was carrying his rider like a
bird, when a strong flight of rails had almost too ugly an
aspect of height, strength, and newness for the liking of our
friend on his 'mount.' The keen eye of Assheton Smith, as he
rode beside him, at once discerned that he had no relish for
the timber, and seeing that he was likely to make the horse
refuse, he cried out, '_Come up, Cicero!_' His well-known
voice had at once the desired effect; but Cicero's rider, by
whom the performance was not intended, left his 'seat' vacant,
fortunately without any other result than a roll upon the
grass."
"I have said," remarks Nimrod, "that Mr. Smith's make and
shape, together with a fine bridle-hand, have assisted him in
rising to perfection as a horseman."
"I once saw," relates a friend, "a fine specimen of Mr. Smith's
hand and nerve in the going off of a frost, when the _bone_
was not quite out of the ground. We were running a fox hard
over Salisbury Plain, when all at once his horse came on a
treacherous flat, greasy at top, as sportsmen say, but hard
and slippery underneath. The horse he rode was a hard puller,
and very violent, named Piccadilly; and the least check from
the bridle, when the animal began to blunder, would have to a
certainty made him slip up. Here the fine riding of the squire
shone conspicuously. He left his horse entirely alone, as if he
were swimming; and after floundering about and swerving for at
least a hundred yards, Piccadilly recovered himself, and went
on as if nothing had happened."
"At the end of a desperate run, he once charged the river
Welland, which divides the counties of Leicester, Northampton,
and Rutland, and is said to be altogether impracticable. The
knack he had of getting across water is to be attributed to his
resolute way of riding to hounds, by which his horses knew that
it was in vain to refuse whatever he might put them at."
One day when Smith was drawing for a fox on his famous horse Fire-King,
he came to a precipitous bank at the end of a meadow, with a formidable
drop into a hard road. "_You can't get out there, Sir_," said a civil
farmer. "_I should like very much to see the place where +we+_"
(patting Fire-King) "_cannot go_," was the reply, as down he rode, to
the astonishment of the field.
"In falling," says Sir J. Eardley Wilmot, "he always contrived
to fall clear of his horse. The bridle-rein, which fell as
lightly as breeze of zephyr on his horse's neck, was then held
as in a vice. In some instances, with horses whom he knew well,
he would ride for a fall, where he knew it was not possible for
him to clear a fence. With Jack-o'-Lantern he was often known
to venture on this experiment, and he frequently said there was
not a field in Leicestershire in which he had not had a fall.
'I never see you in the Harborough country,' he observed to a
gentleman who occasionally hunted with the Quorn. 'I don't much
like your Harborough country,' replied the other, 'the fences
are so large.' 'Oh!' observed Mr. Smith, 'there is no place you
cannot get over with a fall.' To a young supporter of his pack,
who was constantly falling and _hurting_ himself, he said, 'All
who profess to ride should know _how_ to _fall_.'"