LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK 149 



split rails in twelve-feet lengths and to a sufficient height 

 (four feet and upwards) — keeping them together as we can 

 zigzag cards on their edges across the table, and supporting 

 them at the angles with two or three other split rails stuck 

 upwards. At this description of fence you have to ride 

 either sideways, or by turning in the last few strides as you 

 ride. And, stalwart as they are, the snake fences are 

 neither so lofty as the champions am.ong their morticed 

 brethren nor, being more closely built and so in a measure 

 resembling a wall, are they so deterrent to the eye of one 

 whose collar-bones have already been knotted and spliced 

 amid the rail-guarded pastures of Leicestershire. 



Now the chase was following a lane. " This is as it 

 should be," thought I, as I thundered down the hard, 

 beaten cattle-track after my cicerone. " Wonder if they 

 have any gates in these parts ? " The answer came soon, 

 with the end of the " lane " (as I had deemed it for a short 

 hundred yards). Two rails alone blocked the outlet, at a 

 height no whit below the average of the obstacles just 

 reasoned with. Hempstead was already being quietly 

 squeezed, as the moment demanded or measurement 

 suggested, and in a few seconds more the pink back was 

 gliding onward, with the black rail outlined as it were a 

 belt against his waist. (I remember Custance on The 

 Doctor served me just such a trick — ah, how many years 

 ago ! — in a lane beyond Lowesby : only that it was not 

 quite so much so, except that the ground was just as hard.) 

 And yet now nobody stopped, and nobody, as far as I 

 know, was down. We should one and all have done the 

 former, had the scene been laid in the Merry Midlands. 

 Then some good man would have jumped off to pull it 

 down ; and then, like enough, many of us would have 

 ridden through without thanking him, or even catching 

 his horse. 



But I shall weary you. For so engrossed was I with 

 my own task, my own difficulties, wonderments, and, I 

 may add, keen enjoyment, that with one eye given to the 

 pack and the other divided between the artistic back in 

 front of me and the next-coming complication in front of 

 him, I had no leisure to note much of what others 



