392 LEAVES ERO^I A HUNTING DIARY 



"Duchess" was ridden a^^ain in a Point-to-Point near Epping, 

 but althouo'h she made a gallant effort, she had shot her bolt 

 when she reached the last fence, and fell all of a heap, her 

 owner escaping- without a scratch. 



Mr. Sewell declares that he will never have another hunter 

 like " Duchess ; " and this we can well believe, for during the 

 twelve seasons he rode her with the Essex Hounds, we never 

 knew the mare turn her head from a fence, and she could sweep 

 over the widest ditch without an effort, and was away like a 

 bird almost before she had landed, gaining twenty lengths on 

 a sticky horse at every fence. 



We get big musters in Essex, but they look small in comparison with 

 the huge fields one encounters in the Midlands or in the heart of Leicester- 

 shire. And last week, too ! Many had gone racing, but neither wind or 

 rain deterred at least 300 putting in an appearance at Crick upon the 

 midday of the week, for is it not, as Brooksby writes, " the centre of the 

 choicest playground upon which the Pytchley are privileged to romp ; and 

 didn't they romp to some tune, visiting one covert four times? 



They manage things in a leisurely fashion in that part. Ostensibly 

 meeting at twelve, it was 12.30 before we moved off; mostly a dull-coated 

 assemblage, for it was raining hard, and it was twenty minutes to one 

 before the Master could get the covert sufficiently clear to allow a fox to 

 have a chance, but Mr. Wroughton knows how to manage a Pytchley field, 

 and not a hound was allowed to enter Crick Gorse before we had all drawn 

 up in compact order at one corner. 



The time went pleasantly enough chatting with a lady who had hunted 

 nearly all her life in Essex, but who would not now exchange grass for 

 plough for a heavy guerdon. Who would ? Unless 'twere for the barbed 

 wire, which, in the Pytchley country, rears its hideous, hydra-headed form 

 in many unsuspected places, in spite of the strenuous efforts of the 

 executive to grapple with it, and which, upon the day in question, very 

 nearly brought dire disaster to a dear friend of my own, a parson, who 

 always rides his own line. Jumping up a bank, over a ditch, between two 

 trees (they have banks and doubles even in the Shires), the warning cry of 

 " Wire " reached him just as his horse, chesting, struggled against it. 

 Truly it was a case of Scylla and Charybdis. To go forward was madness, 

 for it would cut the horse frightfully ; to retreat almost impossible, for the 

 trees prevented turning to the right hand or to the left, and a fall back- 

 wards with the horse on the top of him seemed the inevitable and only 

 solution of the problem. The horse resisted being pulled back, but 

 eventually having to come, managed to fall sideways into the ditch as he 

 staggered and reeled as his legs slipped from under him. " Well out of 

 that," said Brooksby, as he rode past, and so most would think from the 

 above description. 



An account of the day's sport could hardly interest anyone in Essex, 

 but Brooksby's description of it is decidedly amusing. One man riding a 

 pulling horse voting it a rotten day, another man on a steady old hunter 

 finding it delightful. A fox in every covert was a novel experience, and 

 one old dog we viewed across Mr. Muntz's park was much too good a 

 customer to be caught upon a medium scenting day. Hounds at times 

 ran much too fast for gates that didn't yield at the first push, and the first 



