a description of a fox-hunt is not very agreeable either to read or to write,—firstly, because it records a series of events of no very great importance when they are over; and secondly, because the picture generally bears the appearance of exaggeration; the reason being, that it is composed of two parts, one of which it is almost impossible accurately to delineate. the danger or difficulty which a man and horse incur in taking any particular leap depends on the one hand upon the size of the fence, and on the other upon the combined amount of weight, strength, and activity which the horse can bring up to it. in trade, if a given weight, whether small or great, be put into one scale, it can be at once over-balanced by putting a still greater weight into the other scale. but while the dimensions of a fence can accurately be measured, it would be not only very difficult to determine the physical powers of a hunter, but, even if the statement could be made, ninety-nine people out of every153 hundred would most certainly disbelieve it; for, as the old proverb says, "seeing is believing;" so when a man has ridden a horse across his farm for many years, he is fully persuaded that,—to use another common expression,—"he knows what he is made of." but the truth is, he only knows what he has done, and what he can do under the maximum of excitement he hitherto has ever experienced; what he does not know, and indeed what without trial he can have no idea of, is the enormous amount of latent physical power in his horse which even the sight of hounds will develop.

for instance, in riding a hack along the road, the confidence or, as it may be termed, the courage of the rider depends not on himself, but on the strength and action of the animal he is bestriding. if the nag picks up his feet quickly, and pops them down firmly—if he goes stout in his canter and strong in his gallop, his owner rides boldly. if, however, the very same hero crosses a poor, weak, weedy animal, with strait action, tripping in all his paces, and with his toes sending almost every loose stone rolling on before him, he declares the instant he dismounts that he has been frightened; which difference, in truth, only means that, on trial, he has satisfactorily and unsatisfactorily ascertained the physical powers of the first horse to be amply sufficient, and those of the last totally insufficient, to perform the given amount of work he requires. now it is really no exaggeration to say, that the excitement 154to a horse caused by the presence of hounds creates in his physical powers as wide a difference as exists between those of the two nags just described. the old, jaded, worn-out, "groggy" hunter, who came hobbling out of his stable, and who has been fumbling and blundering under his groom along the road, no sooner reaches the covert side than, like a lion "shaking the dew-drops from his shaggy mane," he in a moment casts away the ills which flesh is heir to—in short, his prostrated powers suddenly revive; and accordingly it is on record, that in one of the severest runs with stag-hounds ever known in essex, the leading horse was aged, twenty-two. again, on the road, when a horse has travelled thirty or forty miles, he usually becomes more or less tired; whereas, during the ten or twelve hours that a hunter is out of his stable, he will, with the utmost cheerfulness, besides trotting more than that distance on the road, follow the hounds for many hours across a heavy country and large fences; and as it is well known that, in harness, a horse is less fatigued by trotting before a carriage on a hard macadamized road for forty miles than in dragging it through an earth road for ten, it would appear almost fabulous to state how many miles on the road, or especially on dry turf, could be performed by the amount of excitement, activity, and strength expended by a hunter during a long and severe day's work.

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for the foregoing reasons, if a man during summer rides his hunters, he will see a variety of fences which, as he quietly ruminates, he will pronounce to himself to be impracticable, simply because he can both see and feel that they are greater than the powers he is bestriding; and yet, when the trees are leafless and the hounds running, if he happens on the same horse to come to these very fences, he crosses them without the smallest thought or difficulty—not because he is excited (for the cooler he rides the better he will go), but because, while the height and breadth of each fence have not since he last saw them increased, the physical powers of his horse, developed by hunting, have been, to say the least, doubled. the scales which in summer had turned against him now preponderate in his favour; and accordingly prudence, who but a few months before, with uplifted hand, had sternly warned him to "beware!" with smiling face and joyous aspect now beckons to him to "come on!"

the feats which the mere skin and bones of a horse can perform during hunting are surprising. the comparatively small shin-bone of his hind legs will, without receiving the smallest blemish, smash any ordinary description of dry oak or elm-rail, and occasionally shiver the top of a five-barred gate, and yet, strange to say, though the frail bone so often fractures the timber, the timber is never able to fracture the frail bone, which,156 generally speaking, receives not the smallest injury from the conflict. again, when even a singed horse at great speed has forced his way through a high, strong, spiteful-looking thorn-hedge, frightening almost into hysterics the poor little "bull-finch" that is sitting there, he almost invariably passes through the ordeal with his skin perfectly uncut, and often not even scratched!—nay, a horse going at great speed may be thrown head over heels by a wire fence without receiving from it the smallest blemish!

the trifling facts we have just stated will, we believe, not only explain the courage and physical powers of a hunter, but the difficulty of describing to non-hunting readers, without an appearance of exaggeration, the feats which, during a run, he can without danger or difficulty perform; for, instead of boasting about a large fence, it is an indisputable fact that it is infinitely safer for the horse, and consequently for his rider, than a little one, at which almost all their worst accidents occur: indeed when a liberal landlord, for the benefit of his tenants, cuts through their fields a series of narrow deep drains, to be loosely filled up with earth, it is good-humouredly said by hunting men, that he is "collar-boning" them!

and now it is an extraordinary truth that the excitement which the horse feels in simply witnessing the chase of one set of animals after another, seems to pervade157 every living creature on the surface of the globe. in savage life, the whole object, occupation, and enjoyment of man, whenever he is not engaged in war, consists in catching and killing almost any of the creatures that inhabit the wilderness through which he roams. in a drop of putrid water a microscope informs us that animalcules of all shapes and sizes, with the same malice prepense, are hunting and slaying each other. the 600 boys at eton, if collected together, would resolve readily among themselves to receive with decorum, and no doubt with youthful dignity, any great personages about to honour them with a visit; and yet, while the grand procession was approaching them, or even just after it had arrived, if a rat were to run about among them, all their good intentions in one moment would be destroyed.

during the grand reviews in france of the allied armies under the command of wellington, although the british troops had behaved steadily enough at waterloo, it was found that the presence and authority of "the iron duke" were utterly unable to keep them immoveable as soon as the hares began to jump up among them. nay, at inkerman, while the battle was raging, several men of the guards were observed by their officers suddenly to cease firing at the russians, who were close to them, in order to "prog" with their bayonets a poor little scared hare that was running among their feet!

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in like manner, although the anglo-saxon race are proverbially phlegmatic (a word described by johnson to mean "dull; cold; frigid"), yet no sooner do they hear, in the language of shakspeare,

"the musical confusion

of hounds and echo in conjunction,"

than the windows of manufactories are crowded with pale eager faces, the lanes, paths, and fields become dotted with the feet and ankles of people of various classes and ages, whose eyes are all straining to get a glimpse of the run. if dolly be among them, her cow, wherever she may be, is quite as curious as herself.

as the fox, who has distanced his pursuers, lightly canters along the hedge-side of a large grass field, the sheep instantly not only congregate to stare at him, but for a considerable time remain spell-bound, gazing in the direction of his course. herds of bullocks with noses almost touching the ground, and with long straight tails slanting upwards, jump sometimes into the air, and sometimes sideways, with joy. as soon as the hounds appear, the timid sheep instantly follow them, and accordingly, almost before the leading rider can make for and get through perhaps the only gap in an impracticable fence, eighty or a hundred of these "muttons," with fat, throbbing, jolting sides, rush to and block up the little passage, in and around which they stand,159 forming a dense mass of panting wool, on which no blow from a hunting-whip or from a hedge-stake produces the slightest effect; and thus the whole field of gentlemen sportsmen, to their utter disgust, are completely stopped. "i had no idea," lisps a very young hard-riding dandy, in as feminine and drawling a voice as he can concoct, "i really hadn't the slightest idea, before, that sheep were such —— fools!" but their offspring are, in their generation, no wiser. a poor little lamb, almost just born, the instant it sees the hounds, will not only leave its mother to follow them, but under the legs of a crowd of horses—that if they can possibly avoid it will never tread upon it—canters along, until, its weak knees and lungs failing, it reels, and is left lying on its side, apparently dead.