22 RIDING 



and their skill and courage so great, that though mounted 

 usually, if not habitually, on animals comparatively inferior to 

 the flyers of the hunt, they always make a good fight of it, and 

 are almost always seen at the finish, whether of twenty minutes 

 up wind at steeplechase pace, or of a couple of hours gruelling 

 through deep ground and over strong fences. They get there 

 somehow, certainly to their own satisfaction, though with what 

 struggles, what hair-breadth 'scapes of deadly peril, is known 

 only to themselves, and in a lesser degree to their amazed quad- 

 rupeds, who must indeed wonder at finding themselves ' in that 

 galley,' since bestridden by ninety-nine men out of a hundred 

 instead of by the special hundredth by whose scientific hands 

 they have had the luck to be steered, they would have been like 



the gem'man in pink 

 Who swore at his tail we should look, 

 Not in the next parish I think, 

 For he never got over the brook. 



These bruisers to whom 



nought comes amiss, 

 One horse or another, that country or this, 



are recruited from all sorts and conditions of men, frequently 

 from the farmer class, while the medical profession supplies one 

 if not two examples in most hunts. They make young horses 

 and often ride them for sale, thereby conferring great benefit 

 on the sporting world, since the confidential hunter, unlike the 

 poet, is never born but always made, whatever the hard riders 

 over the dinner-table may say to the contrary. ' Mount me on 

 what you like, my dear fellow,' says Sir Brag over his second 

 bottle of champagne ; ' so long as he can go the pace, we shall 

 get over the fences somehow, and speed will always make up 

 the lost ground.' Not the less when he reaches the covert side 

 the following morning does he privately interview his friend's 

 groom, and most closely cross-examine him as to the jumping 

 powers of the borrowed nag. He looks the gift horse in the 

 mouth and in the manners too. Does he pull ? Does he rush ? 

 Is he bold at water, and careful at timber ? Does he ever turn 



