Letters from Sir F. B, Head. 363 



has tasted the green fields of Northamptonshire, he will see 

 what a mistake he has made in giving 240,000?. for an estate 

 in the wrong county. The best thing he could do would he 

 to sell it at once, and buy my little house at Oxenden ; and if 

 it gave him the health and happiness it gave me, it would be to 

 him a capital purchase. There is nothing I am convinced so 

 dangerous as not hunting. As a proof of this, on the day after 

 Christmas, I had a worse fall than any I had during my ten 

 years' hunting with the ^ Pytchley.' I w^as galloping along 

 over turf by myself, when my mare fell head over heels, and 

 I lay on the ground insensible for fifteen minutes. I am 

 getting over it, but being half-way between seventy and eighty, 

 it is more easy to kill than to cure me." &c., &c. 



3. 



[18G7] 



In his seventy-eighth year, he thus writes to his friend : — 



*' Your welcome letter has set my whole mind and memory 

 running riot. Its two pages are composed of a series of texts, 

 upon every one of which I feel that I could write you a long 

 sermon, except the one which says, ' And two good days in the 

 woods.' I should have to scratch my head a long time before 

 it would tell my pen how to connect together your adjective 

 ' good ' with your substantive ' wood,' which, although they 

 rhyme very well together, I firmly believe them to be as dis- 

 similar as the tAvo words 'paradise' and 'purgatory.' 



" The different runs you have detailed, I have gone over as 

 carefully as a beagle picks out the trail of a jack-hare. I am 

 very sorry that the one thing needful has so often been * not at 

 home,' 



" The fable that tells us of ' the hare with many friends, 

 per contra, we now read all over England of the fox with many 

 enemies. Though my hunting career has now ceased for some 

 time, up to my seventy-sixth year I continued to amuse ni}"- 

 self almost every day by riding over timber. I may add the 

 same as before. In my seventy-seventh year, I found that I 

 was always at every leap almost rocking off ; and I then dis- 

 covered that I had lost what Assheton Smith called the 'grip:' 

 60, instead of giving up hunting in my scventy-eigliih year^ 

 hunting gave me up. 



