LORD SOUTHAMPTON 125 



About a month after Lord Southampton's hound-van 

 had excited the interest and admiration of the inhabit- 

 ants of the Quorn country, Colonel Russell, on a horse 

 named Chesterfield (which formerly belonged to the earl 

 of that name, but at the time of the feat belonged to 

 Lord Alvanley), made a somewhat memorable leap. 

 The hounds were running hard, the gallant colonel was, 

 as usual, taking a line of his own, and was sailing along 

 in a good position, when an apparently practicable fence 

 came in the way. At it went the colonel, and by the 

 time his horse took off he was aware that there was a 

 very wide dyke on the landing side, and which, as he 

 afterwards confessed, he would not have ridden at had 

 he known of its existence. Chesterfield, however, was 

 equal to the occasion, and on subsequent measurement 

 the distance cleared was proved to be 33 feet 3 inches. 



At the time of which we are speaking (season 

 1828-29) hunting brought a good deal of grist to the 

 local mill, and some ingenious statistician calculated that 

 in the different Leicestershire hunting centres there were 

 kept no fewer than six hundred horses, and these were 

 exclusively used in following the hounds. Taking the 

 annual expense of each of these at ^60, a contributor to 

 the Leicester Journal reckoned that no less a sum than 

 ,£36,000 was brought into the county in the course of 

 one year, to say nothing of what was expended by their 

 owners in other directions. In those days hunting men 

 were practically compelled, whether they liked it or not, 

 to buy their forage from local vendors, so at that time 

 hunting necessarily put a good deal of money into the 

 pockets of the inhabitants. So for that matter it does 

 now. Yet in the Field of February 27, 1897, will be 

 found a letter written by a Leicestershire man to 

 " Brooksby," one of the Field s hunting correspondents. 

 The writer of the letter draws attention to the fact 

 that at a Hunt ball then recently given a band and the 



