FOX-HOUNDS. 179 



mai'k — regularly run clown by an hour and twenty 

 minutes with two very short checks. Had the latter 

 part of the run been as fast as the first, there vrould have 

 been very few of us there to see the finish. 



ON THE LINCOLKSHIEE WOLDS. 



I started to meet Lord Yarborough's hounds, from 

 the house of a friend, on a capital Wold pony hack. It 

 used to be said, before non riding masters of hounds 

 had broadcasted bridle-gates over the Quorn country, 

 that a Leicestershire hack was a pretty good hunter for 

 other counties. We may say the same of a Lincolnshire 

 Wolds pony — his master, farming not less than three 

 hundred and more likely fifteen hundred acres, has no 

 time to lose in crawliirg about on a punchy half bred 

 cart-horse, like a smock-frocked tenant — the farm must 

 be visited before hunting, and the market-towns lie too 

 far off for five miles an hour jog-trot to suit. It is the 

 Wold fashion to ride farming at a pretty good pace, and 

 take the fences in a fly where the gate stands at the 

 wrong corner of the field. Broad strips of turf fringe 

 the road, offering every excuse for a gallop, and our 

 guide continually turned through a gate or over a 

 hurdle, and through half a dozen fields, to save two 

 sides of an angle. These fields contrast strangely with 

 the ancient counties — large, and square, and clean, with 

 little groimd lost in hedgerows. The great cop banks 

 of Essex, Devon, and Cheshire are almost unknown — 

 villages you scarcely see, farmhouses rarely from the 

 roadside, for they mostly stand well back in the midst 

 of their acres. Gradually creeping up the AVold — j)ass- 

 ing through, here vast turnip-fields, fed over by armies 



