68 SPORTING REMINISCENCES 



up to Friarston and back again. Here I was 

 within three miles of home with a fourteen-mile 

 hunt behind me and I gave up ; it was also getting 

 very dark. I remember after we had left Cahermary 

 coming to a boggy river near Licadoon. Three 

 gallant men rode at it. Splash, splash, splash, 

 they went in. Then another and then someone 

 found an easier place. I got in and out. As I was 

 riding home past Roxboro the fox crossed under 

 my feet tired but running gamely, and I suppose 

 I ought to have gone on, but there was an old 

 gorse close by, full of holes where I thought he 

 must save himself. He tried to get home. For 

 the last mile the three who kept on only rode by 

 sound and he was run into two miles from where 

 he started from, after seventeen miles with six of 

 it a steeplechase. I never saw so many horses 

 lame and cut about as when I left them. It was 

 a wonderful bit of hunting, if not over the best of 

 countries. 



We had a very fine short hunt in the same 

 country four seasons ago in which I was riding a 

 four year old. He went very well but he tired in 

 heavy going just before the end and we came to a 

 wide ditch with the landing higher than the take 

 off. I guessed that he would just not do it, and 

 he did not. We were tumbling backwards slowly 

 when whack ! I felt a blow on my back and a horse 

 hitting me hard from behind righted Little 

 Bendigo so that he came on his feet into the drain. 



