which we steal from English authors: but this is not all. To
successfully hunt a fox, to jump fences 'cross country like an unruly
steer, is no child's play. To ride all day on a very hot and restless
saddle, trying to lope while your horse is trotting, giving your friends
a good view of the country between yourself and your horse, then leaping
stone walls, breaking your collar-bone in four places, pulling out one
eye and leaving it hanging on a plum tree, or going home at night with
your transverse colon wrapped around the pommel of your saddle and your
liver in an old newspaper, requires the greatest courage.

Too much stress cannot be placed upon the costume worn while
fox-hunting, and in fact, that is, after all, the life and soul of the
chase. For ladies, nothing looks better than a close-fitting jacket,
sewed together with thread of the same shade and a skirt. Neat-fitting
cavalry boots and a plug hat complete the costume. Then, with a hue in
one hand and a cry in the other, she is prepared to mount. Lead the
horse up to a stone wall or a freight car and spring lightly into the
saddle with a glad cry. A freight car is the best thing from which to
mount a horse, but it is too unwieldy and frequently delays the chase.
For this reason, too, much luggage should not be carried on a fox-hunt.
Some gentlemen carry a change of canes, neatly concealed in a shawl
strap, but even this may be dispensed with.

[Illustration]

For gentlemen, a dark, four-button cutaway coat, with neat,
loose-fitting, white panties, will generally scare a fox into
convulsions, so that he may be easily killed with a club. A
short-waisted plug hat may be worn also, in order to distinguish the
hunter from the whipper-in, who wears a baseball cap. The only
fox-hunting I have ever done was on board an impetuous, tough-bitted,
fore-and-aft horse that had emotional insanity. I was dressed in a
swallow-tail coat, waistcoat of Scotch plaid Turkish toweling, and a
pair of close-fitting breeches of etiquette tucked into my boot-tops.
As I was away from home at the time and could not reach my own steed I
was obliged to mount a spirited steed with high, intellectual hips, one
white eye and a big red nostril that you could set a Shanghai hen in.
This horse, as soon as the pack broke into full cry, climbed over a
fence that had wrought-iron briers on it, lit in a corn field, stabbed
his hind leg through a sere and yellow pumpkin, which he wore the rest
of t