100 A SHARP BURST AND A HARD RUN. 



have enabled him, as he saw at once it would Magher, 

 Goodricke, and Saddell, and even Jardinier, to com- 

 pel a raw horse so to measure his stroke, lent him 

 courage and confidence ; and, finding how strongly 

 and solidly his horse strode under him, when not one 

 or two, but many, of the others were laboring heavily, 

 he ventured to make play a little, and without putting 

 him to his full speed, shook him a length or two 

 ahead, and took the next fence foremost of the field 

 at a fly. It was a very nasty one, a tall, ragged oak 

 paling, leaning toward him from the top of a bank two 

 or three feet high, with a broad drain on the hither 

 side, and what he neither saw nor suspected, a little 

 ditch or grip about two feet wide and a foot deep, at 

 some yards distant from the paling on the other side. 

 This sort of arrangement, seeming, as it does, to be 

 intended precisely for the purpose of catching the fore- 

 feet of any horse leaping the fence in that direction 

 at full swing, is termed a squire-trap, and is perhaps 

 more dreaded by the fox-hunter than any other modi- 

 fication of ditch, rail, and bank, that he is in the habit 

 of encountering. This place, lying in so famous a piece 

 of country as it did, between the two most crack co- 

 verts in the hunt, was of course well known to every 

 one who had hunted Leicestershire even a single sea- 

 son, and it was always taken warily and with the ut- 

 most exercise both of hand and judgment, so that in the 

 very point of time when Fairfax charged it, quite too 

 quickly for that style of leap, the oldsters were screw- 

 ing themselves well down into their pigskins, and the 

 youngsters were, to say the truth, some of them shaking 

 in their stirrups. All presaged, as they saw him shoot 

 ahead, a certain fall to the bold stranger ; Jardinier 

 grinned a malicious smile of triumph, and Matusche- 

 vitz, who was almost as anxious for his protege's suc- 

 cess as for hi^ own place in the run, would have shouted 



