

THE RIDER. 197 



nature dependent upon the health, the circulation, and the 

 liver. As memory to imagination in the student, so is nerve to 

 pluck in the Jiorseman. Not the more brilliant quality, nor the 

 more captivating, but sound, lasting, available for all emer- 

 gencies, and sure to conquer in the long run.' Probably no 

 man ever rode to hounds who united these two qualities in 

 a more striking degree than Assheton Smith, and his three 

 favourite maxims were : Throw your heart over and your horse is 

 sure to follow ; there is no place that you can't get over with a fall; 

 and no man can be called a good rider till he knows how to fall. 



Of the first and last of these maxims the truth is indisput- 

 able, and so, in a sense, is it with the second. No man, 

 whatever may be the country he hunts in, can make up his 

 mind to really see where hounds go and what they are doing, 

 without taking falls into account. He must be prepared for 

 them, and he will have them. Nevertheless the tyro will do 

 well to remember that his primary business in the hunting field 

 is to get over his fences without falls ; that the first and most 

 obvious motive of the partnership between horse and rider is 

 that it should be firm and lasting, not frail and intermittent. 

 While, therefore, taking all possible contingencies into account, 

 his first care should be to so manage matters that he and his 

 companion may encompass their fences together and not sepa- 

 rately. There was no spice of bravado in Assheton Smith's 

 saying ; neither, doing what he did, can he be held to have 

 fallen unnecessarily. Whether he was hunting the hounds 

 himself or not, his one fixed, unalterable resolve was always to 

 go into the same field with them. Nor did he, as did most of 

 his straight-going contemporaries, ride finished hunters, or as a 

 rule give long prices. Some of his best nags were notoriously 

 such as many men, and good riders too, could have done 

 nothing with ; some, indeed, are said to have been such as few 

 men would even have cared to mount. ' He entertained,' it has 

 been said, ' no fancies as to size, action, above all peculiarities 

 in mouths and tempers. Little or big, sulky, violent, or restive, 

 if a horse could gallop and jump, he was a hunter the moment 



