28 Cross Country with Horse and Hound 



soft on the landing side, attempted to pull his horse away ; 

 but the horse, instead of answering to his hand with a turn 

 of his body, brought his head round until it nearly touched 

 his rider's leg. On went the mount, striking the rail fence 

 breast-high, horse, rider, and fence coming down in a crash. 

 The rider was caught by the fence, and pinned to earth 

 between it and his horse a sickening sight. Fortunately 

 for the rider, the ground was soft. Beside having an 

 awful shaking up, and the flesh of his legs horribly scraped 

 and bruised, he was left unconscious for several hours. The 

 same thing occurred to a friend of mine, whose horse went 

 slam-bang against a barbed-wire fence because his neck was 

 too weak or too limber to answer to the pull of the rider. 

 The poor beast was horribly mangled and nearly ruined 

 for life. 



I have dwelt upon this point because it is one seldom, if 

 ever, mentioned by writers, and because we hear so much 

 nowadays about having " plenty of horse in front of you." 

 So there should be; but look well to the substance of a 

 hunter's neck. "There is ain thing aboot a hunter a canna 

 forgie," said a keen hunting friend of mine in Scotland, 

 " and that is a neck with na starch in it ! " The neck 

 can hardly be too long unless too thin; it can hardly be 

 too low unless too short and thick, and of two evils better 

 a horse that bores than a horse that soars. You sometimes 

 see in a dealer's stables these up-headed horses. They are 

 generally clean trotting-bred animals that have had their 

 manes pulled and their tails chopped off, and these are 

 their principal qualifications as hunters. Some of them can 

 jump, and we have seen this sort win at Madison Square 



