CHAP. II.] Pytchley Hunt Visitors, ^^i 



Squire Wood of Brixworth Hall, about the same time, 

 rode a chestnut horse with white legs, who for five-and- 

 twenty minutes could carry his eighteen stone up to any 

 hounds in England. A brougham horse, and rather a 

 commoner than that, so far as appearance went, he was 

 a sufficiently good hunter for his owner to decliue part- 

 ing with him to Lord Jersey for five hundred pounds. In 

 our own day we have seen the welter, Matthew Oldacre 

 of Clipston, a rare specimen of the Northampton- 

 shire hunting-farmer, going well ahead on horses whose 

 fathers and mothers must have been well acquainted 

 with the operations necessary for seed-time and harvest. 

 The cases here mentioned are probably the exceptions 

 that form the rule, as to the advantages of quality in 

 horse as well as in man; but they serve to prove two 

 things : first, that a horse can go in auy shape and 

 almost of any birth; secondly, that well-nigh everything 

 depends upon the ^' man on the box.^' 



An occasional attendant at the meets about this time 

 was a sportsman, who, in after years attained distinction 

 amounting to a world-wide celebrity in an arena very 

 different from that of the hunting-field. 



When Mr. Murchison rode up to the covert side, not 

 one thea present could have supposed that he was greet- 

 ing one, who in a few short years would have established 

 the reputation of being the greatest geologist of his 

 time. Even then, however, the bacilli of earth-lore and 

 scientific knowledge had entered into his system, and on 

 every non-hunting day his time was passed in 

 examining the gravel-pits and stone- quarries of the 

 neighbourhood. 



About this date a '^ craze '' had entered the heads of the 



