RIDING AT STAG-HOUNDS. 2O/ 



If you had a second Eclipse under you, and rode him 

 fairly with them, yard for yard, you would stop him in 

 less than twenty minutes ! 



Yet old practitioners, notably that prince of sports- 

 men the Rev. John Russell, contrive to see runs of many 

 hours' duration without so entirely exhausting their 

 horses but that they can travel some twenty miles home 

 across the moor. Such men as Mr. Granville Somerset, 

 the late Mr. Dene of Barnstaple, Mr. Bissett himself, 

 though weighing twenty stone, and a score of others 

 for in the West good sportsmen are the rule, not the 

 exception go well from find to finish of these long, 

 exhausting chases, yet never trespass too far on the 

 generosity and endurance of the noble animal that 

 carries them to the end. And why? Because they 

 take pains, use their heads sagaciously, their hands skil- 

 fully, and their heels scarcely at all. To their experi- 

 ence I am indebted for the following little hints which 

 I have found serviceable when embarked on those wide, 

 trackless wastes, brown, endless, undulating, and spacious 

 as the sea. 



There are happily no fences, and the chief obstructions 

 to be defeated, or rather negotiated, are the " combes" 

 a succession of valleys that trend upward from the 

 shallow streams to the heathery ridges, narrowing as they 



