EFFECTS CAUSED BY THE SIGHT OF HOUNDS. 155 



For the foregoing reasons, if a man during summer 

 rides his hunters, he will see a variety of fences which, 

 as he quietly ruminates, lie will pronounce to himself to 

 be impracticable, simply because he can both see and feel 

 that they are greater than the powers he is bestriding ; 

 and yet, when the trees are leafless and the hounds run- 

 ning, if he happens on the same horse to come to these 

 very fences, he crosses them without the smallest thought 

 or diflSculty — not because he is excited (for the cooler he 

 rides the better he will go), but because, while the height 

 and breadth of each fence have not since he last saw 

 them increased, the physical powers of his horse, deve- 

 loped by hunting, have been, to say the least, doubled. 

 The scales which in summer had turned against him 

 now preponderate in his favour ; and accordingly Pru- 

 dence, who but a few months before, with uplifted hand, 

 had sternly warned him to " beware ! " with smiling face 

 and joyous aspect now beckons to him to " Come on!" 



The feats which the mere skin and bones of a horse 

 can perform during hunting are surprising. The com- 

 paratively small shin-bone of his hind legs will, without 

 receiving the smallest blemish, smash any ordinary 

 description of dry oak or elm-rail, and occasionally shiver 

 the top of a five-barred gate, and yet, strange to say,- 

 though the frail bone so often fractures the timber, the 

 timber is never able to fracture the frail bone, which, 



