BRITISH SPORT PAST AND PRESENT 



he stands over his four-hundred-guinea chestnut, then rising 

 from the ground after giving him a heavy fall — his tail nearly 

 erect in the air, his nostrils violently distended, and his eye 

 almost fixed. " Not hurt, I hope," exclaimed Mr. Maxse, to 

 somebody whom he gets a glimpse of through the openings of 

 a tall quickset hedge which is between them, coming neck and 

 croup into the adjoining field, from the top bar of a high, hog- 

 backed stile. His eye might have been spared the unpleasing 

 sight, had not his ear been attracted to a sort of procumbit- 

 humi-bos sound of a horse falling to the ground on his back, 

 the bone of his left hip indenting the greensward within two 

 inches of his rider's thigh. It is young Peyton, who, having 

 missed his second horse at the check, had been going nearly 

 half the way in distress ; but from nerve and pluck, perhaps 

 peculiar to Englishmen in the hunting field, but very peculiar 

 to himself, got within three fields of the end of this brilliant 

 run. The fall was all but a certainty ; for it was the third 

 stiff timber-fence that had unfortunately opposed him, after 

 his horse's wind had been pumped out by the pace ; but he 

 was too good to refuse them, and his horse knew better than 

 to do so. 



The Mneid of Virgil ends with a death, and a chase is not 

 complete without it. The fox dies within half a mile of 

 Woodwell-head cover, evidently his point from the first ; the 

 pack pulling him down in the middle of a large grass field, 

 every hound but one at his brush.' 



Such was fox-hunting in Leicestershire in the days of 

 William the Fourth. Multiply the number of the field by 

 three or four, stir in references to railways, ladies, and perhaps 

 to an overlooked strand of wire, and the story might stand as 

 of to-day. 



Wire began to come into use in the late 'fifties : in 1862 the 

 Atherstone country was dangerously wired : in 1863-1864 Mr. 

 Tailby's was so much wired that special endeavours were 

 successfully made to remove it. Barbed wire was first used 

 in England in 1882. 



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