RIDING TO HOUNDS 21 



seasons at Melton. He shall stand forth to bear witness how 

 greatly a master of the art of riding may dare at a pinch, and 

 yet how impossible the feat may be to all but to him whose 

 mind first grasped the opportunity. Mr. Gilmour says : 



The most impossible fence I ever saw jumped was by Wilbra- 

 ham Tollemache, a brother of Lord Tollemache ; it consisted of an 

 ox-rail, a very tall bullfinch which no man could see through, and 

 which looked and was as solid as a house, a very wide ditch, a 

 strong flight of railings three feet and a-half high beyond, into a 

 road. It was the first fence from Glooston Wood. Wilbraham 

 got the best start of anyone, but I and many others were not more 

 than sixty yards behind him and saw him do it. The field soon 

 became full of horsemen, I need not say we were all pounded and 

 had to go to a gate a long way off, and saw Wilbraham and the tail 

 hounds disappearing in the distance, going towards Langton Cald. 

 well ; unfortunately for him, there was not much of a run. There 

 appeared to be no part of the fence from which a horse could have 

 struck back with its hind legs. I have not exaggerated this fence, 

 rather the contrary. Sterling Crawfurd at that time lived at Lang- 

 ton ; we went from there more than once to look at the place after- 

 wards, and could not have believed that any horse could have got 

 over it unless we had seen it done with our own eyes. 



Wilbraham rode a pulling little horse we called ' Emperor.' 

 Atkinson (the Emperor) bought him afterwards. This I should say 

 happened about forty years ago. Wilbraham Tollemache is still 

 alive, and has a son, who like himself is a capital rider. 1 



Mr. Gilmour adds : ' If you think this fence big enough for 

 the next volume of Badminton Library you can put it in.' We 

 do indeed ; if any reader is dissatisfied he must complain to 

 the Editor. 



Precedence except over a country is held in small account 

 by horsemen ; they stand not on the order of their going save 

 when hounds are running, else it might have seemed more 

 fair to accord first place in print to those riders to whom 

 money is an object, but whose love of the sport is so keen, 



i Not long after this letter was written, Mr. Gilmour, then eighty: years old, 

 died of pain and the sleeplessness caused by pain, which he bore without a 

 murmur, almost without a groan. 



