PRELIMINARY CANTERS. 181 



into breeching and booting than does even the softer product 

 of the London pavement. There is a lean and active kind, it is 

 true, that forms yet another variety — a type similar to the raw- 

 boned shikari of the East. These never fatten, and they cannot 

 work thinner ; they walk and they ride ; they neither tire nor 

 ueed they starve themselves — " A Leicestershire leg, my dear 

 fellow, as straight as a cane and as thin as a crop. A bucket 

 of rain won't wet my stocking till my fellow succeeds in 

 stretching my new tops!" But with the many (supposing 

 always that they have any decent regard for appearances and 

 any thought for the future as induced by six days a week up to 

 Christmas) the first adjustment of duly connecting etceteras is 

 a process of difficulty, that too often ripens during the day of 

 trial to a state of positive agony. 



A word in season. Four days one week and five the next 

 (i.e. without training) offer an allowance not discreditable to 

 any hunting quarter. This is an average obtainable where, as 

 in this quiet corner, five different packs all touch a little circle 

 as many miles in width. It needs no oracle to proclaim that 

 the duty of every hunting man (bent on eking the maximum of 

 enjoyment out of the winter, and who counts every day lost as 

 an atom of life unfulfilled) is to let no single opportunity slip, 

 leave no chance unseized, of getting to the covertside ere winter 

 has really time to assert her claim as his doorkeeper. After 

 Christmas let him hunt as often as he can. Before Christmas 

 every day — if hounds are to be reached and a sound horse is in 

 the stable. November is the month of sound horse — and had 

 we not ten weeks of frost in young 188G ? It so happens that 

 Tuesdays are the almost universal discard by packs hunting the 

 Rugby and Weedon district. He must be a man singularly 

 without resource, and boasting a quite lamentable immunity 

 from the casual worries and anxieties of this life, who cannot 

 find occupation of some other kind on this one day. On every 

 other of the week he is beneficently treated : and if at the end 

 of the season he can look back upon his Tuesdays as the only 

 occasions of absence from hounds, he will surely not be able to 



