370 THE BEST OF THE FUN 



perience I am never tired of retailing to my thrusting 

 comrades of the Shires, and that now, in all modification 

 of script and adjective, I am about briefly to repeat. (By 

 the way, I have a parenthesis. It may be remembered by 

 the incredulous that I then wrote of more than one five- 

 feet timber-fence occurring in that run of 1892. Only 

 two montlis ago I chanced to be again in Long Island for 

 a day on my way West. Driving from Mineola I came 

 across one of those very fences, jumped out, .and stood 

 alongside of it. It was/?/// five feet, and with a drop into 

 the road — the road, it is true, not macadamised.) And 

 now I will tell you how the horses upon Long Island are 

 taught to negotiate with ease and certainty these un- 

 bending obstacles. Almost every man who has a hunt- 

 ing-box or stables on the Island makes a point of fixing 

 up a circular school, round which each horse in turn 

 is practised without rein or encumbrance. Heavy log- 

 timbers form the two jumps, and are raised or lowered 

 by weight or pulley. No horse is considered fitted to 

 begin with hounds till he can go readily round, taking 

 each jump at five feet. Thus taught, and with the ground 

 invariably sound, on the grass hard as an Indian maidan, 

 no wonder they seldom make a mistake, and that thus 

 riding-to-rounds is a practicable, if not a very popular, 

 pastime upon Long Island. 



I had seen this exercise enacted a day or two previous 

 in the schools of Mr. T. Hitchcock and of the Club, in 

 both of which a three-year-old had easily jumped the 

 required height. And in both of these stables, as well as 

 in those of Mr. Winthrop and Mr. Ellis, I had been privi- 

 leged to look over various made hunters, whose perform- 

 ance is beyond question, and whose appearance was 

 alone a most sufHcient guarantee of the necessary power. 

 Verily, a bad horse would readily break your neck upon 

 Long Island ; so, needless to say, he is unsought for, 

 whatever his price. Mr. Hitchcock's neat horses are 

 altogether of the long, low, and thoroughbred type ; Mr. 

 Winthrop's, on the contrary, are tall and upstanding ; so 

 is at least one of Mr. Ellis's, while Lofty, a bay on which 

 Mr. Herbert was to-day mounted, is taller than all, being 



