REmNISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN. 51 



year, I find myself speaking to some extent of a past 

 generation, while at the same time my own active step, 

 thanks to the bounty of Heaven, remains, and I joy 

 in woodcraft and in rural scenes as much as ever. 

 The thing that left me, and began to leave me early, 

 was nerve over a country. Nerves are strange 

 things, and not to be accounted for, and they quit 

 the horseman at a fence, when they stand by him in 

 all else besides. Few hunting men like to admit 

 the failure of their riding nerves, and always lay 

 their having been "no where" in a run to some 

 other cause. Wine is never the cause of a man's 

 unsteadiness after dinner ; it is always the apple he 

 ate at dessert, or coming out into the open air, that 

 takes him off his legs, and makes him hold fast to 

 the ground to prevent his going any further. In 

 the same way want of nerve never loses a man a run, 

 whereas, if the truth were told, want of nerve and of 

 instant decision loses a man more runs than all other 

 C07itretems put together. 



The first symptom of a man's riding-nerves failing 

 him (I call them riding-nerves, because they are decid- 

 edly apart from other nervous sensibilities), when the 

 rider has been a good one, is in the start from the cart 

 with stao-.hounds with a lot of hard-2;oino^ men around 

 him, or with a fox from the side of a gorse. When 

 the riding-nerve is the least shaken, the eye objects to 

 seeing men down and perhaps bleeding, and the ear 

 shrinks from the crash of fences right and left, over- 

 borne with the knowledge, too, that there are perhaps 

 a dozen fellows following in his wake who can't take a 

 line for themselves, and are safe to be on him if he falls. 

 Long after a rider's nerve has begun to fail him, if he 

 can get a start with an advantage over the field, on a 



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