rse, to be in good working health, should carry nearly all the
hard flesh that he can put upon him. How such an one must laugh in his
sleeve at the five hunters of the young swell who, after all, is brought
to grief in the middle of the season, because he has got nothing to
ride! A farmer's horse is never lame, never unfit to go, never throws
out curbs, never breaks down before or behind. Like his master, he is
never showy. He does not paw, and prance, and arch his neck, and bid the
world admire his beauties; but, like his master, he is useful; and when
he is wanted, he can always do his work.

O fortunatus nimium agricola, who has one horse, and that a good one, in
the middle of a hunting country!

THE MAN WHO HUNTS AND NEVER JUMPS.

The British public who do not hunt believe too much in the jumping of
those who do. It is thought by many among the laity that the hunting
man is always in the air, making clear flights over five-barred gates,
six-foot walls, and double posts and rails, at none of which would the
average hunting man any more think of riding than he would at a small
house. We used to hear much of the Galway Blazers, and it was supposed
that in County Galway a stiff-built wall six feet high was the sort of
thing that you customarily met from field to field when hunting in that
comfortable county. Such little impediments were the ordinary food of a
real Blazer, who was supposed to add another foot of stonework and a sod
of turf when desirous of making himself conspicuous in his moments of
splendid ambition. Twenty years ago I rode in Galway now and then, and
I found the six-foot walls all shorn of their glory, and that men whose
necks were of any value were very anxious to have some preliminary
knowledge of the nature of the fabric, whether for instance it might
be solid or built of loose stones, before they trusted themselves to
an encounter with a wall of four feet and a half. And here, in England,
history, that nursing mother of fiction, has given hunting men honours
which they here never fairly earned. The traditional five-barred gate
is, as a rule, used by hunting men as it was intended to be used by the
world at large; that is to say, they open it; and the double posts and
rails which look so very pretty in the sporting pictures, are thought to
be very ugly things whenever an idea of riding at them presents itself.
It is well that mothers should know, mothers full of fear for their boys
who are