42 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN 



is in the start from the cart with staghounds with a lot of 

 hard-going 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, overborne 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 favourite horse, he will sail away as triumphantly 

 as ever, but his nerves are not proof against the dangers that a 

 long experience has shown him sometimes attend the most able 

 horsemen and horses. When I say dangers, it is not that the 

 man shrinks from encountering any danger, but it is rather 

 allied to the sensation engendered by the shower-bath overhead : 

 you can't make up your mind to pull the string. In the 

 whole course of my experience, I never saw nerves last so long 

 as those of my brother, Admiral Berkeley. I am told that Mr. 

 Ashton Smith's nerves never fail him, and all the world knows 

 what a first-rate man he has been over a country ; but then he 

 lived to ride, and, I believe, almost dieted himself for it, whereas 

 my brother, Admiral Berkeley, always liked his bottle or more 

 of wine, and never gave his nerves a thought. The state of the 

 stomach, or the amount of wine over-night, has usually a vast 

 deal to do with it. For myself, my life has ever been a most 

 regular one, never having been overtaken in liquor, as the saying 

 is, although, when I joined the Coldstream Guards, I had plenty 

 of thirsty examples before me. The sight of the fool a drunken 

 man makes of himself, and the secrets he lets out, made me, at 

 the age of sixteen, resolve never to place myself in that position, 

 and nothing has ever shaken that determination. I like a glass 

 of wine ; but a bottle, when I am alone, would last me three 

 days, though it is in my power to drink any quantity, and yet 

 retain my senses. More than once in my life it has been my 

 unpleasing lot to be shut up for a night with a host of fellows 

 who seemed to me to have resolved not to rise from the table 



