RIDING RECOLLECTIONS 



valour nor discretion are much help to us 

 then. 



From the pace at which hounds cross a country, 

 there is unfortunately no time to practise that 

 most discreet manoeuvre called " leading over," 

 when the fence is of so formidable a nature as to 

 threaten certain discomfiture, yet I have seen a 

 few tall, powerful, active men, spring off and on 

 their horses with such rapidity as to perform this 

 feat successfully in all the hurry of a burst. The 

 late Colonel Wyndham, who, when he commanded 

 the Greys, in which regiment he served at 

 Waterloo, was said by George the Fourth to be 

 the handsomest man in the army, possessed with 

 a giant's stature the pliant agility of a harlequin. 

 A finer rider never got into a saddle. Weighing 

 nineteen stone, I have seen him in a burst across 

 Leicestershire, go for twenty minutes with the 

 best of the light-weights, occasionally relieving 

 his horse by throwing himself off, leaping a fence 

 alongside of it, and vaulting on again, without 

 checking the animal sufficiently to break its stride. 



The lamented Lord Mayo, too, whose tall 

 stalwart frame was in keeping with those intel- 

 lectual powers that India still recalls in melancholy 

 pride, was accustomed, on occasion, thus to 

 surmount an obstacle, no less successfully among 

 the bullfinches of Northamptonshire than the 

 banks and ditches of Kildare. Perhaps the best 



12S 



