CAPT. BURNS-HARTOPP'S FINAL SEASONS 189 



Scent was exceptionally good with the com- 

 mencement of the New Year, but I was unable to 

 take any active part after 28th December. On 

 that day I took a fall, the effects of which lasted for 

 ten years, though finishing the day and riding home 

 fourteen miles. 



It was rather a curious fall, and I was never 

 very clear what really happened, but think the horse 

 must have struck me on the head with a forefoot. 

 The horse was one given me by Mr. " Foxy " Keene, 

 and a very bold hunter. I turned him rather 

 quickly out of a road at a small place, but to my 

 surprise he swerved and went sideways into a deep 

 ditch full of thorns, which was also the village sewer. 

 I was head down through the thorns and in some 

 danger of drowning, with my legs sticking up in the 

 air ; but the reins having caught in my spurs, the 

 horse plunging pulled me out. 



For the next two or three seasons riding was 

 really more pain than pleasure, and this must there- 

 fore finish my references to individual seasons. 



My last day in 1904 was with the Belvoir on 

 loth February, when they found a fox in Bescaby 

 Oaks and killed him near Cottesmore village, which 

 was a nine-mile point. My head was troubling me 

 at the time and was not therefore able to see much 

 of the run, but I managed to see the end, and after a 

 fourteen-mile ride home on a bad hack, wrote my 

 account for the Field and retired to bed for ten 

 weeks. 



Taking it all in all, of the runs that I saw and 

 those my friends told me about, I consider this to 

 have been one of the best seasons within my ex- 

 perience. The ground had been thoroughly satur- 



