The long distance plates on the Turf dating back to the time of Anne have been replaced by the Queen's premium stallions, periodically on view at Islington, and at the disposal, for a small fee, of horse owners throughout the country. These fine animals are almost all the winners of races. The necessary expense of racing suggests the usefulness, as in an earlier chapter was seen, of the sporting plutocrat to the Turf, and hence to the national quadruped generally. Unless the sport gave to its followers some sort of social diploma, the wealthy breeders whom the mart has furnished to the racecourse, from the earliest of the Rothschilds down to the latest of the Hirsches or the Maples, would scarcely have given time and money to their own pleasure as well as to the country's good. To pass to the horse in another aspect, the conjectural estimate of packs of hounds at the beginning of the hunting season in 1837 was 28. At a corresponding date in 1897 the ascertained figures were 61. This does but faintly indicate the change undergone by the national sport. Not even John Leech's pictorial satire in _Punch_ could deter the Cit from the hunting field, or discourage him from educating himself into a more than passable rider across country. Capel Court has or had a cry of beagles of its own. At longer distances from London than the Surrey pastures 15 per cent. of the wearers of pink and buckskin wear on ordinary days the glossy uniform of the brokers and jobbers of the House. A little earlier in the year, these sportsmen were tramping after partridges by the early September twilight that they might be at their business in the City before the West End sits down to breakfast. This is a specimen of what goes on throughout the kingdom. On the outskirts of all great cities, co-operative shootings are as common as co-operative stores. Other pastimes are too much in daily evidence to need many words or to allow the apprehension that the male acceptance of the feminine lawn tennis implies any degeneration in the Victorian race of youth. The addition of Scotch golf to English games, and the vast improvement as to pace, style, and time shown by crews at Henley or on the Metropolitan waters in 1897 over 1837 may dispel any fears of a deterioration of youthful stamina or of muscular zeal. Whether as regards its own surface or the meadows which it waters, the Thames in the South, like the Tyne or Mersey in the North, is still a river that feeds the sea of English manhood.