HUNTING WITH HOUNDS. 169 



good riding ; though a good rider to hounds 

 must also at times ride hard. 



Cross-country riding in the rough is not a 

 difficult thing to learn ; always provided the 

 would-be learner is gifted with or has acquired 

 a fairly stout heart, for a constitutionally timid 

 person is out of place in the hunting field. A 

 really finished cross-country rider, a man who 

 combines hand and seat, heart and head, is of 

 course rare ; the standard is too high for most 

 of us to hope to reach. But it is compara- 

 tively easy to acquire a light hand and a 

 capacity to sit fairly well down in the saddle ; 

 and when a man has once got these, he will 

 find no especial difficulty in following the 

 hounds on a trained hunter. 



Fox-hunting is a great sport, but it is as 

 foolish to make a fetish of it as it is to decry it. 

 The fox is hunted merely because there is no 

 larger game to follow. As long as wolves, 

 deer, or antelope remain in the land, and in a 

 country where hounds and horsemen can work, 

 no one would think of following the fox. It 

 is pursued because the bigger beasts of the 

 chase have been killed out. In England it 

 has reached its present prominence only within 

 two centuries ; nobody followed the fox while 

 the stag and the boar were common. At the 

 present day, on Exmoor, where the wild stag 

 is still found, its chase ranks ahead of that of 

 the fox. It is not really the hunting proper 

 which is the point in fox-hunting. It is the 

 horsemanship, the galloping and jumping, and 

 the being out in the open air. Very naturally, 



