THE HARROW COUNTRY 



145 



somebody may always be trusted to say at a shootin^'-party 

 luncheon, it was not the worst part of the day. The nearest 

 I ever get to it is in the commercial room of a country inn : 

 a good place to make for, both for fare and company. 

 Exclusive, no doubt, but we can all travel in small courtesies. 

 But there was a hazardous as well as a gay side to a 

 jumping party. There was always the chance of being 

 chivied, caught, and haled before some rural Jeffreys by the 

 angry occupiers of the soil. Embalmed in the oral history 

 of the school were noble legends of stand-up fights and 

 desperate melees, in which brave Harrow boys of the past 

 had successfully engaged a savage but courageous peasantry. 

 In my time no one was ever caught, and there were no fights 

 or melees of this Homeric kind, but I remember Arnold ' and 

 myself being chased. The farmer's men, encouraged by their 

 employer's curses and liberal promises of beer, until he was 

 beaten off by want of condition, ran well over a fine line of 

 country on the Pinner side, and the palisade of the Phil- 

 athletic field, which was our point, is not the sort of obstacle 

 you can take in your stride. However, we shinned over it 

 somehow by a short head, and they did not follow us into 

 the school territories. The episode lost nothing in the telling 

 at ' Four Bill.' I recall these reminiscences in evidence of 

 an almost morbid consciousness of the preciousness of grass 

 which animated the occupiers of land all about Harrow as 

 far back as 1868-9. 



Lord Cork became Master of the Buckhounds for the 

 first time in 1866. But long before that the Harrow country 

 was a sort of hunting Eastern Question. For several years 

 prior to 1866 his predecessors had been discouraged, if not 

 actually prevented, from taking the hounds into the best of 



' To ray sorrow, Arnold died the following year, in the middle of the term, 

 quite suddenly, and after a few days' illness. I missed him very much. For a 

 long time we had inhabited the same forms ; our progress up the school being 

 very temperate. 



L 



