22 LETTERS TO YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 



Next we come to the van, the first flight. Anyone can be 

 with them ; there are no reserved seats ; but this taking a 

 line of your own is a more difficult thing to excel in than almost 

 anything in the wide realm of sport. It can be no more 

 taught than writing a novel can be. It either is or is not in 

 a man. It looks so easy, sweeping along, never in a hurry, 

 keeping up with hounds however fast they run, without 

 apparent effort, always jumping the fence exactly in the right 

 place, just where the take-off is best and where the landing 

 is safest. If hounds bend they always seem to turn towards 

 rather than away from this fine exponent of the game. Even 

 has he time to unlatch and swing back many a gate. Hounds 

 come out of every covert on the side which he has chosen. 

 All seems so simple. It is not always the good horsemen 

 who have this gift. Many fine horsemen have not got it, 

 nor ever will have. If a man has it and happens to be a 

 fine horseman he is undefeatable. I shall always remember 

 a very little man and very fat, who had this intuitive gift 

 in a marked degree, who, provided he did not fall off, was 

 hard to beat. If he did fall off, no power on earth would put 

 him up again, unless he could climb on some object as high 

 as the saddle. I never saw him ride at an impracticable 

 place at a fence, and I knew when hounds turned they would 

 turn to him. He chose his ground and, in spite of his 

 weight, got, in the very first flight, to the end of many 

 big runs. But though his head was long his legs 

 were very short and his " deck hamper " enormous, 

 coupled with the fact that he rode big, powerful 

 blood horses, he was often jumped clean off, and a 

 " peck ' unshipped him like an orange. I recommended 

 him to put a strap through each of the breastplate D's 

 and across the pommel of the saddle ; this he gripped 

 as the horse neared the fence, and it saved him 

 scores of falls. I do not advise gripping anything, 

 because if you suddenly let go a horse's head he is as likely 

 to refuse as not ; but his horses were so perfect they never 

 knew what refusing was. Still, he had an almost uncanny 

 gift of riding to hounds. Many men will ride behind those 

 who actually cut out the work, jumping every fence and 

 going where they go, full of courage and determined to see 



