2o8 HUNTING. 



gallop on? How is it that he always seems to anticipate every turn 

 of the hounds ? How is it that, no matter how deep the country, 

 how hot the pace, how big and how frequent the fences, yet at 

 the end of the run, which he invariably manages to reach be- 

 fore you, his nag is in so much better plight than yours ? than 

 yours which has all the blood of all the equine Howards in its 

 Veins, and is as well lodged and as well cared for almost as one 

 of ' Ouida's ' dandy guardsmen. It \?> judgment that does it all. 

 The man with a head on his shoulders will always get the best 

 of it here in the hunting field as elsewhere 'in among the 

 throngs of men.' Some of us perhaps still remember with 

 grateful feelings poor Mayne-Reid's enchanting romances, as we 

 used to think them once upon a time. One of the most start- 

 ling of them, 'The Headless Horseman,' introduced the hero to 

 us with some such words as these : ' Something is wanting to 

 this solitary rider. What can it be ? Good heavens ! it is the 

 head.'' That is precisely the something wanting to so many of 

 our horsemen, and the something that must be got by everyone 

 who aspires to be ranked among his fellows as a really ' good 

 man to hounds.' 



But how to get it ? asks the impatient youth. Can no one 

 teach it me ? Is nothing then to be learned from books ? Have 

 all these wise men, from old Markham to Whyte-Melville, 

 written in vain ? Far be it from us to say so. Many admirable 

 lessons are there contained in these books, inspired by the full- 

 ness of knowledge and of the heart, lessons wherefrom he who 

 is ' to the manner born ' may no doubt learn much. The rider 

 who is also a reader, and blessed with a good memory, should 

 he ever find himself in a situation precisely similar to one he 

 remembers to have been treated of in his books, may then put 

 his precepts into practice, and no doubt prosper greatly. But 

 the difficulty is that in hard fact situations are so very rarely 

 precisely similar to those one reads of in books. A professor of 

 mathematics at Oxford once discovered a system by which the 

 hazard of betting could be reduced to a certainty ; a mathe- 

 matical certainty, for he did not profess to have proved his 



