2G2 COVERT-SIDE SKETCHES. 



treat too luxurious, for the side of a fox-hunting covert to be 

 brought into the least successful similitude. 



" The anxious crisis thus arrived, and every bosom glowing 

 with emulative inspiration, a single aspiration of acquiescence, 

 and a removal of the horse who heads the leading hound, give 

 a loose to the body of the pack ; and superlatively happy he 

 who can lay the nearest to them. Upon the deer's going off 

 from the cart, two of the yeomen prickers start likewise, in 

 such parallel directions to the right and left as not to lose 

 sight of the line he takes, so long as they can keep him in view, 

 by which means they get five or six miles forward to assist in 

 stopping the hounds at any particular point where they happen 

 to run up to them ; and if it was not for this prudent, necessary 

 precaution, half or two-thirds of the horsemen would never see 

 the hounds again in the course of the day. 



" The joyous burst and determined velocity of every hound, 

 followed by upwards of a hundred horsemen, all in action at a 

 single view ; the sport embellished, or rather variegated, with 

 carriages containing ladies, who come to enjoy the ceremony of 

 turning out; and the emulative exertions of horses, hounds, 

 and men, afford a blaze of sporting brilliancy beyond the power 

 of the utmost mental fertility to describe. At this moment of 

 rapturous exultation only it is that the kind of horse indispen- 

 sably necessary for this particular chase can be ascertained, for 

 out of a hundred and twenty, thu'ty, forty, or a hundred and 

 fifty horsemen, seven or eight only shall lay anywhere near or 

 within a hundred yards of the hounds, for the longer the burst, 

 the more the slow-going horses tail ; so that when the hounds 

 are stopped upon the heath, or in an open country, by the few 

 who are up, lines of horsemen are seen far behind, more than a 

 mile in length, getting forward in a variety of directions, bearing 

 no inapplicable affinity to various teams of wild ducks crossing 

 from one country to another. These horses, to whom it is all 

 labour, are so distressed, even with the first burst, that if the 

 hounds break away, and the deer crosses the country, they arc 



