374 The Wilderness Hunter. 



obstacles they have on the other side of the water, would 

 gallop away from a field of our Long Island horses ; for 

 they have speed and bottom, and are great weight carriers. 

 But on our own ground, where the cross-country riding is 

 more like leaping a succession of five- and six-bar gates 

 than anything else, they do not as a rule, in spite of the 

 enormous prices paid for them, show themselves equal to 

 the native stock. The highest recorded jump, seven feet 

 two inches, was made by the American horse Filemaker, 

 which I saw ridden in the very front by Mr. H. L. Herbert, 

 in the hunt at Sagamore Hill, about to be described. 



When I was a member of the Meadowbrook hunt, 

 most of the meets were held within a dozen miles or so of 

 the kennels : at Farmingdale, Woodbury, Wheatly, Locust 

 Valley, Syosset, or near any one of twenty other queer, 

 quaint old Long Island hamlets. They were almost 

 always held in the afternoon, the business men who had 

 come down from the city jogging over behind the hounds 

 to the appointed place, where they were met by the men 

 who had ridden over direct from their country-houses. If 

 the meet was an important one, there might be a crowd of 

 onlookers in every kind of trap, from a four-in-hand drag 

 to a spider-wheeled buggy drawn by a pair of long-tailed 

 trotters, the money value of which many times surpassed 

 that of the two best hunters in the whole field. Now 

 and then a breakfast would be given the hunt at some 

 country-house, when the whole day was devoted to the 

 sport ; perhaps after wild foxes in the morning, with a drag 

 in the afternoon. 



