^Nimrod ' 



* Not hurt, I hope,' exclaims Mr. Maxse, to somebody 

 whom he gets a ghmpse of through the openings of a tall 

 quickset-hedge which is between them, coming neck and 

 crop 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 

 procumhit-humibos 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-timbered fence that had unfor- 

 tunately 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 chace 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. Jack Stevens with 



man, Mr. Thomas Edge of Nottinghamshire, who some years back refused, 

 from the late Lord Middleton, the enormous sum of two thousand two hundred 

 pounds for two of his horses, and on another occasion fifty pounds for the 

 loan of one of them during the first run of the day from a certain cover, whether 

 short or long. 



1 The only son of Sir Henry Peyton, Bart., one of the best and hardest 

 riders of the present day. 



