234 THE CONDITION OF HUNTERS 



to his groom. " He was kicked in the salt marsh, 

 Sir," replied Will. " This is a clever grey horse," 

 resumed I to his groom ; " what makes him so thin ? " 

 " He has been in a salt marsh." " What is the 

 matter with his hock, that it appears twice as big as 

 the other ? " " He was kicked in the salt marsh. 

 Sir." " Are you certain," continued I, " that neither 

 of them has caught the glanders ? " On his assuring 

 me that neither of them had, I told him his master 

 was always a lucky man, or he would not have come 

 off so cheap. So much, then, reader, for the benefit 

 of a salt marsh ! But " what is salt without its 

 saltness ? " is a question which has been asked before. 



As I find I have still some opponents to my plan of 

 summering the hunter in the house, and though some 

 of them are so feeble that they are scarcely worth a 

 remark ; yet upon the principle that " Nihil tarn 

 fir mum est cui pcriculum non sit etiam ah invalido " ; 

 or, in humble English, that " the strongest things are 

 in danger from the weakest " ; I shall bring forward 

 a little more testimony to my aid, as I have it so close 

 at hand. 



In the first place, I rode the horse of which I have 

 just been speaking one very wet day this last season 

 with Mr Warde's hounds. I had another horse out 

 which had been summered in the stable, and which 

 returned home at the same time with the other — each 

 drenched with rain. The horse summered in the 

 stable was dry and had his clothes on in little more 

 than half an hour ; whilst the one summered in the 

 field was not dry after three hours' hard labour being 



