So they plucked me; but I persevered in my course of study notwithstanding. Do I not know and love Jorrocks? If I could find out Soapy Sponge in the flesh, would I not ask him to come and stay with me, and feed him and mount him, and let him smoke as much as he liked in his bedroom? Nay, I think I would even have bought the piebald pony of him as a cover hack; for to ride either Sir ’Ercles or Multum-in-Parvo would have been beyond my highest aspirations. Nay, with all his absurdities and affectations, I have a sneaking kindness for the dismounted sportsman in “Ask Mamma” who hung his wet towel out at window on doubtful nights, though he had not a horse to his name, and was no more likely to go out hunting than if he had been bed-ridden. Yes, I like the whole thing—the hounds, the horses, the servants, the second-horse men, the splashes on my top-boots, the golden drops on the gorse covert, and the wreath of cigar-smoke curling upward into the mild soft air.
People talk about hunting going out; being on its last legs; civilised away before the advance of railroads, the march of intellect, &c. All this is sheer nonsense. There are more men hunt to-day than hunted twenty years ago, twice as many as hunted thirty, and probably ten times as many as hunted fifty years ago. Hounds run harder than they did in the time of our fathers; horses are better bred, better kept, better bridled, and better ridden. The country is also more enclosed, and there is consequently a deal more jumping, and more occasion for skill and quickness, than when High Leicestershire was an open upland, and Naseby field an unfenced marsh. The best of the old ones could not have gone “a cracker” in higher form than the dozen or so of men who may be seen any morning in the week with any of our crack packs of hounds in a quick thing; and in the “days of Old Meynell” there was a good deal more room for those who liked to try. It really is by no means an easy matter to thread a crowd of a hundred horsemen in a narrow lane, all going racing pace, and then to jockey the best ten or a dozen of these for the easiest place in the first fence. The actual feat of keeping near hounds when they run hard requires skill and quickness; but the difficulty is much enhanced when it has to be performed by a score of men where there is only comfortable space for five. It is a pleasant sensation, too, when the first impediment has been disposed of, and a man feels what the fast ones of the present day call “landed,” to sail away with the hounds, always supposing he is riding a hunter, and to feel that he will not now be interfered with till they check, but can do his own places at his own pace, without pulling his horse out of his stride, and gain all the advantages of seeing the hounds turn, while he has all the pleasure of watching them as they shoot across the fields, in swift, streaming line.