Page:Old Melbourne Memories.djvu/232

. He had run and won many a race, beginning as early as 1835, when he competed with Mr. C. Smith's Chester—a half-brother, by the way—on the old Botany Road racecourse, near Sydney. I, with other schoolboys, attended this meeting, and have a clear remembrance of the depth of the sand through which the cracks of the day—Whisker, Lady Godiva, Lady Emily, and others—had to struggle for the deciding heat.

He was the property of Mr. Hugh Jamieson, of Tallarook, Goulburn River, as far back as 1841 or 1842. That gentleman, one of the originators of the Port Phillip Turf Club, temporarily relinquished breeding, and Traveller passed into the hands of a discriminating and enthusiastic proprietor, Mr. Charles Macknight, late of Dunmore, and by him was employed in the foundation of the celebrated Dunmore stud.

When I referred to the moral defect of "Traveller"—a horse that deserves to be bracketed with "Jorrocks" in the equine chronicles of Australia—my meaning had reference to the temper which he communicated to his immediate, and, doubtless, by the unvarying laws of heredity, to his remoter descendants. This was as bad as bad could be, chiefly expressed in one particular direction—the crowning characteristic vice of Australian horses—that of buck-jumping. Curiously, the old horse was quiet and well conducted himself, though there was a legend of his having killed a man on the Sydney racecourse by a kick. However that might be, he was apparently of a serene and generous nature.

So was his first foal born at Dunmore. "St.