Ladies in the Field: Sketches of Sport

by Unknown

The second stage was further still, and we guessed it at about sixty miles on to Perth.

Happily the horses came out looking fresh and fit, having fed and rested well, and, by ten o'clock, we were once more on the move.

This time the roads were better, but still rather elementary in some places, and we encountered several of those old hogbacked bridges which are very trying to the pole, and more than likely to break it as it jerks up, on the top, when the leaders are going down one side, while the wheelers are still climbing up the other. We stopped an hour at Blair Athole on the way, and fed the horses, while we ourselves had lunch.

The team was pretty well steadied by this time, and as easy to drive as a single horse; though, of course, it needed judgment to keep them trotting steadily on for the ten or eleven hours it took to do the journey.

The last stage, from Perth to Fife, was on the beautiful old north road all the way, and, as it was only a distance of twenty miles, we did it leisurely, and turned into our own stable-yard about three hours after we started.

It was great fun, and, after driving for so long, I felt I could have gone on for weeks, but for an acute knowledge of where every bone began and ended in both my arms and back.

We accomplished that same journey twice that year; the first time in spring, and again in September we came down after the grouse-shooting with a different team. That second time was not quite such a success, as the cold was something frightful, and the hurricanes that swept over the tops of those moorland hills nearly blew us all away (we had a brake instead of the coach, as being lighter for the horses and handier for the luggage, etc.). The whole of the first two days it poured unceasingly, a good, honest, unrelenting deluge, and I never shall forget our plight on arriving at Blair Athole, soaked to the skin, while my coat pockets were so full of water that my pocket-handkerchief was floating about on the surface like a boat on a pond.

We dried ourselves as best we could at the kitchen and laundry fires of the hotel, but we were just as sopped as ever ten minutes after we had started again. However, 'tis a poor heart that never rejoices, and we all revived later in the evening, after we had become dry and warm and recurled (which is very important to a lady's happiness). Nothing makes one feel so miserable and dejected as the knowledge one is "quite unbanged," as an American was once heard to exclaim, on catching sight of her straightened fringe in the looking-glass.

I have always been very fortunate in my cargo, which makes a vast difference to one's pleasure in driving.

I do not object to my passengers clinging on to the carriage, nor even to their pinching each other, but people who shiver and squeak, and, worse than all, make clutches at the reins, ought really to be condemned to take the air in handcuffs, or else to walk.