Walk home fast, even if you get wet to the skin in so doing. Keep on walking, or if you are on a horse, keep on trotting and cantering alternately, till you get home.
If your horse is tired after a hard day’s hunting and it is a cold wet evening, keep him moving for his own sake as well as your own.
I had ridden fifty miles during the day (a run with stag hounds which had taken me twenty-seven miles from home). The mare was getting leg weary, so I unwisely stopped at an inn, six miles from home, and put her in the stable to give her warm gruel with beer in it.
When I started half an hour later to lead her home she was unable to move. I had to leave her for the night at the inn and after making her as comfortable as possible and rubbing her legs with brandy I walked home by myself.
If I had taken her straight home without stopping to gruel her she would have reached home all right, and had her gruel there and laid down comfortably.
Keep moving when cold and wet, take a hot bath and change the moment you get home. If you feel at all as if you had a chill, go to bed after the bath, put a hot bottle to your feet, pile the eider-down on top of you, drink dried raspberry tea, go to sleep, and perspire. Dried raspberries, a Russian peasant’s remedy, are the best sudorific I know. The raspberries are dried and then used just as if they were tea leaves, and the tea thus made drunk very hot, with sugar to taste.
The leather Swedish waistcoat which I mentioned in my chapter on dress should always be worn if there is the least wind when pistol shooting. It can be worn on the hottest day as it keeps the sun out also and as long as one stands still it does not make one perspire, and wind or rain cannot get through.
A thin mackintosh does not hamper much in pistol shooting.
An umbrella is worse than useless against rain but may be used to keep the sun off. Of course a hat worshipper invariably carries an umbrella.
In rain an umbrella protects only the hat and it drops the water on your shoulders, the worst place you could get wet. People run into others and drip the water onto other people, in fact there ought to be a tax on umbrellas like there is on pistols.