For the foregoing reasons, if a man during summer rides his hunters, he will see a variety of fences which, as he quietly ruminates, he will pronounce to himself to be impracticable, simply because he can both see and feel that they are greater than the powers he is bestriding; and yet, when the trees are leafless and the hounds running, if he happens on the same horse to come to these very fences, he crosses them without the smallest thought or difficulty-not because he is excited (for the cooler he rides the better he will go), but because, while the height and breadth of each fence have not since he last saw them increased, the physical powers of his horse, developed by hunting, have been, to say the least, doubled. The scales which in summer had turned against him now preponderate in his favour; and accordingly Prudence, who but a few months before, with uplifted hand, had sternly warned him to "beware!" with smiling face and joyous aspect now beckons to him to "Come on!"

The feats which the mere skin and bones of a horse can perform during hunting are surprising. The comparatively small shin-bone of his hind legs will, without receiving the smallest blemish, smash any ordinary description of dry oak or elm-rail, and occasionally shiver the top of a five-barred gate, and yet, strange to say, though the frail bone so often fractures the timber, the timber is never able to fracture the frail bone, which,

generally speaking, receives not the smallest injury from the conflict. Again, when even a singed horse at great speed has forced his way through a high, strong, spitefullooking thorn-hedge, frightening almost into hysterics the poor little "bullfinch" that is sitting there, he almost invariably passes through the ordeal with his skin perfectly uncut, and often not even scratched!-nay, a horse going at great speed may be thrown head over heels by a wire fence without receiving from it the smallest blemish!

The trifling facts we have just stated will, we believe, not only explain the courage and physical powers of a hunter, but the difficulty of describing to non-hunting readers, without an appearance of exaggeration, the feats which, during a run, he can without danger or difficulty perform; for, instead of boasting about a large fence, it is an indisputable fact that it is infinitely safer for the horse, and consequently for his rider, than a little one, at which almost all their worst accidents occur: indeed when a liberal landlord, for the benefit of his tenants, cuts through their fields a series of narrow deep drains, to be loosely filled up with earth, it is good-humouredly said by hunting men, that he is “collar-boning" them!

And now it is an extraordinary truth that the excitement which the horse feels in simply witnessing the chase of one set of animals after another, seems to pervade

every living creature on the surface of the globe. In savage life, the whole object, occupation, and enjoyment of man, whenever he is not engaged in war, consists in catching and killing almost any of the creatures that inhabit the wilderness through which he roams. In a drop of putrid water a microscope informs us that animalcules of all shapes and sizes, with the same malice prepense, are hunting and slaying each other. The 600 boys at Eton, if collected together, would resolve readily among themselves to receive with decorum, and no doubt with youthful dignity, any great personages about to honour them with a visit; and yet, while the grand procession was approaching them, or even just after it had arrived, if a rat were to run about among them, all their good intentions in one moment would be destroyed.

During the grand reviews in France of the Allied armies under the command of Wellington, although the British troops had behaved steadily enough at Waterloo, it was found that the presence and authority of "the Iron Duke" were utterly unable to keep them immoveable as soon as the hares began to jump up among them. Nay, at Inkerman, while the battle was raging, several men of the Guards were observed by their officers suddenly to cease firing at the Russians, who were close to them, in order to "prog" with their bayonets a poor little scared hare that was running among their feet!

In like manner, although the Anglo-Saxon race are proverbially phlegmatic (a word described by Johnson to mean "dull; cold; frigid"), yet no sooner do they hear, in the language of Shakspeare,

"The musical confusion

Of hounds and echo in conjunction,"

than the windows of manufactories are crowded with
pale eager faces, the lanes, paths, and fields become
dotted with the feet and ankles of people of various classes
and ages, whose eyes are all straining to get a glimpse
of the run.
If Dolly be among them, her cow, wherever
she may be, is quite as curious as herself.

As the fox, who has distanced his pursuers, lightly canters along the hedge-side of a large grass field, the sheep instantly not only congregate to stare at him, but for a considerable time remain spell-bound, gazing in the direction of his course. Herds of bullocks with noses almost touching the ground, and with long straight tails slanting upwards, jump sometimes into the air, and sometimes sideways, with joy. As soon as the hounds appear, the timid sheep instantly follow them, and accordingly, almost before the leading rider can make for and get through perhaps the only gap in an impracticable fence, eighty or a hundred of these "muttons," with fat, throbbing, jolting sides, rush to and block up the little passage, in and around which they stand,

the

forming a dense mass of panting wool, on which no blow from a hunting-whip or from a hedge-stake produces the slightest effect; and thus the whole field of gentlemen sportsmen, to their utter disgust, are completely stopped. "I had no idea," lisps a very young hard-riding dandy, in as feminine and drawling a voice as he can concoct, "I really hadn't the SLIGHTEST idea, before, that sheep were such fools!" But their offspring are, in their generation, no wiser. A poor little lamb, almost just born, the instant it sees the hounds, will not only leave its mother to follow them, but under the legs of a crowd of horses-that if they can possibly avoid it will never tread upon it-canters along, until, its weak knees and lungs failing, it reels, and is left lying on its side, apparently dead.

CRUELTY OF HUNTING CONSIDERED.

Over the closed eyes, panting flank, and exhausted frame of this tiny, innocent, and yet seduced orphan, who had never known its father, and has just lost its mother, we will venture to offer to our readers a very few remarks on the strange dissolving view that has just vanished, or rather galloped, from their sight.