THE FOREST 159 



These distinctions are often anything- but reassuring : such, 

 for instance, as drains — which, if you get into them, involve a 

 staj' for hours, and a sovereign to pay for a team of cart-horses 

 — menacing stone-faced banks, or impervious doubles. On 

 the other hand, you may be congratulated upon the first 

 draw being in the centre of ' our vale,' or on the sporting 

 indifference of the farmers about seeds and roots. 



The forest and the forest hunting claim and deserve 

 special consideration. To my mind, the forest is not enough 

 appreciated by the gallants who ride to the Queen's Hounds. 

 They think it dull. Some little time ago an article in the 

 ' Spectator ' declared that the ideal of modern hunting is 

 ' to ride hard and straight,' and even went so far as to 

 represent an accident as its pleasurable objective. What 

 would Sir Koger de Coverley and the stone-grey horse 

 have said to this '? I shall admit over and over again in the 

 course of these pages that staghounds are things to ride 

 to. Agreed and agreed, that, tried by the aesthetic canons 

 of a riding country, it is better fun to set a nice horse going 

 after a Reading-bound deer from Hawthorn Hill than 

 through the fir-trees and Spanish chestnuts of Swinley ; 

 but, still, much of the wide landscape stretching away 

 from Ascot to Winchfield and Farnham and Guildford and 

 Woking possesses a chief essential of any hunting country, 

 and the very first essential of a carted-deer country — wild- 

 ness. I do not mean to say that all this country is forest. 

 A low margin of cultivation, the course of a stream, a kinder 

 soil, have here and there invited enclosures and tillage, a 

 farmhouse or two, and a few cottages. But this makes a 

 little change. It is true that the sour grassland is boggy, that 

 the banks are rotten, and that there is a good deal of untidy 

 trailing wire. But you squelch and scramble on in the 

 hope, which always animates the cross-country rider, of 

 soon getting into a nicer bit of country. 



