Loose horses are trials that go far to proving your character; you may make a friend for life by catching his horse. There are, of course, occasions when it would be mere waste of time attempting anything of the sort, when a stupid animal careers wildly away in the opposite direction of hounds; but I am often struck by the way self-centred people let the easiest opportunities pass of serving their neighbours. I have been delighted by seeing men, purposely looking the other way, punished by the confiding animal going straight up to them, making it impossible, with the best show of clumsiness, to avoid bringing him back to his grateful owner, who perspiring, runs across the ridge and furrow, in breeches and boots of the most approved fashion.
There is one other and last side of fox-hunting with which I will conclude.
R. L. Stevenson says, "Drama is the poetry of conduct, and Romance the poetry of circumstances." There is only one sport that combines drama and romance; the sport for kings. There are days when your very soul would seem to penetrate the grass, when, with the smell of damp earth in your nostrils, and the rhythm of blood-stirring stride underneath you, you forget everything, yourself included. These days live with you. They console you for the monotony of Swiss scenery. They translate you out of fierce Indian sunshine; they rise up between you and the gaslight, and shut out the grey grinding streets. You wake up to ask the housemaid half unconsciously whether it is freezing; the answer leaves you uncertain, and you jump out of bed. There is a damp fog on the window, which you hastily wipe away, to see the paths are brown, and the slates wet; there is no sun and no wind. You hear the tramp of the stable boy's feet below your room, and snatches of a song whistled in the yard, you can see the clothes line hung with stable breeches, and a very old dog poking about the court. You tie your tie, left over right, with the precision of habit, and, seizing your letters, run down to breakfast. You are independent of your host; he has a hack. You ask your hostess what she is going to do with herself, while she walks across the yard to see you start in the buggy. You let the boy drive while you read your letters. You thrust them into your pocket and bow faintly over a high coat collar as you swing past the different riders and second horsemen. You see your horses at a corner of the road, and are told you cannot ride Molly Bawn, as she "'it 'erself" in the night—an unsatisfactory way horses valuable have of incapacitating themselves. You get on your horse and ride through a line of bridle gates till you find yourself in a bewildering throng of people and horses, just outside the village. Ladies leaning over their splash boards, talking to fine young gentlemen, unconscious of their shaft, which is tickling a horse of great value, the groom leading it, too anxious about his own mount to observe the danger. Children backing into bystanders, with their habits in festoons over the crupper; ladies standing up in their carriages divesting themselves of their wraps, and husbands unfastening their hat boxes; dealers discreetly and conspicuously taking their horses out of the crowd and cantering them round the field to show their slow paces, looking down at the ground and sitting motionless, as if unconscious of any onlookers. Hard, weather-beaten men in low crowned hats, with double snaffles in their horses' mouths, are feeling their girths, and ladies in long loose coats explaining to their pilots that they wear their strap on their heels, not on their toes. Your host comes up now, and you wonder, to look at his hack, that he ever arrived at all. You ask as delicately as you can what he is riding. "Old S——n," he replies, and you find yourself criticising the winner of a former Grand National. In all this fret and fuss Tom Firr sits like a philosopher, surrounded by the questioning pack; vouchsafing an occasional remark to a farmer or a patron of the hunt. At last the vast field is set in motion, and, with an eye on Firr, you jog down the road to draw. Instead of following the knowing ones, and standing outside the covert at an advantageous point down-wind, you go inside and watch the hounds dancing through the little copse, shaking the dewdrops on the undergrowth, and scattering with indifference the startled rabbit. In perfect stillness you thread your way slowly through the tangled tracks, your horse arching his neck and pointing his toes as if he were stepping to the drum and fife. There is a spring in the grass path, and a thrill in the air which makes you lift your face to the open sky as if to receive the essence of the day, and a blessing from the unseen sun. Suddenly, without warning, a silver halloa rings through the air, driving the blood to your heart, and you find yourself wheeling your horse round and crashing through the undergrowth to a gap you had noticed as you came along. The whole field is thundering round the cover as you jump out of it with the last hound, and the pack makes hard for a fence of impassable thickness. Luckily for you they turn up it, and a lagging hound joins his friends half-way up the fence, where the growers are thinner. The gate is locked, but the rail at the side is jumpable, and your horse takes off accurately and lands you in the same field as hounds. You find yourself with Firr and five or six others, who have galloped twice your distance, to catch them. You avoid a boggy gap, which the two riders ahead of you are making for, and catch hold of your horse for a clean "stake-and-bound." It is down hill, and you feel as if you never would land. You jump into a road, and nearly fall off as your horse turns suddenly down it, following the other horses. The hounds cross, and you are carried down the road past the few places where you could jump out, and the people behind profit by their position and get over where hounds crossed. You hammer along the road with twenty people shouting "Go on!" whenever you want to stop, till an open gate takes you into the field, where you see five or six men a good way ahead of you. Nothing but pace serves you then, and all the warnings in the world that there is wire, or a brook, will not turn you from your intention to catch them again.
By luck, which you hardly deserve, the wire is loose upon the ground, and you only twing-twang it with one shoe as you land, and are off again before it curls like a shaving round your horse's leg.
You have put wire between you and the field, and are now free to go as you please for the next twenty minutes. Firr and five others are your only rivals, and they are ready to whistle a warning where the country gets complicated.
The pack check for a moment outside a small cover, but the fox is too tired and too hard pressed to go into it, and Firr gets their heads down with a sound, quite impossible to spell, and five minutes after, the hounds are tumbling over each other like a scramble at a school-feast, and Firr holds up the fox with an expression in his face as if he could eat him.
You tuck the rug round you, with your mouth full of buttered toast. Your lamps are lit, and the sky is aglow.
"Let 'em go please. Come!" and with a bound and a clatter you leave the sun behind you, and, shaving the gate-post, swing down the turnpike home.