A NASTY OJsK. 383 



tempted there. There is a report that one of the 

 Mr. Russells did it, but a relation of his told me it 

 was not the fact. It certainly is a spreader, but 

 quite navigable on a wide jumper. Like many 

 other leaps, its appearance is formidable, but in 

 reality it is nothing : certainly not more than twenty 

 feet from bank to bank, with sound taking off. When 

 I call it nothing, I do not mean that we often meet 

 such with hounds, but I call it nothing with a crack 

 jumper, and he perfectly fresh. 



A Galloway here, some time since, not fourteen 

 hands, lame, and old, carried eleven stone and a 

 half over the lock of a canal faced with stone on 

 each side, twenty feet from stone to stone a fright- 

 ful leap even to contemplate, much less to ride at, 

 and quite a different affair from the Mar Dyke, where 

 you could only, at worst, get a souse in the water, 

 or a lodgment on a soft bank. Yet the good people 

 of Essex did not listen to my bet, considering it only 

 meant in joke. They would now refuse to take it up 

 for another reason ; steeple-chasing has taught them 

 to think it what I thought it at the time compara- 

 tively nothing. But, though twenty feet under such 

 circumstances is no feat, as with banks a few inches 

 more or less would not matter, the same distance, 

 where three inches would have been destruction, is 

 a somewhat fearful risk of life and limb. A horse 

 of mine, with hounds just going off, out of pure 

 wantonness for he had no occasion to do it took 

 twenty-three feet at a gate with me in Surrey, at 

 Warlingham Common ; but stone copings and canals 

 of twenty feet are quite another affair. 



I have heard it said that colts here learn to leap 

 from being turned into pastures either enclosed by 



