e praises of this country. Strong, well-preserved coverts,
sound grass fields, flying fences, sometimes set on a low bank,
sometimes without a bank, varied by an occasional brook, with now and
then a fence big enough to choke off all but the "customers"--such is
the bill of fare for Fridays. To run from Stonehill Wood, _via_ Charlton
and Garsdon, to Redborn in the duke's country, as the hounds did on the
first day of 1897, is, as "Brooksby" would say, "a line fit for a king,
be that king but well minded and well mounted."

Stand on Garsdon Hill, and look down on the grassy vale mapped out
below, and tell me, if you dare, that you ever saw a pleasanter stretch
of country. How dear to the hunting man are green fields and
sweet-scenting pastures, where the fences are fair and clean and the
ditches broad and deep, where there is room to gallop and room to jump,
and where, as he sails along on a well-bred horse or reclines perchance
in a muddy ditch (Professor Raleigh! what a watery bathos!), he may
often say to himself, "It is good for me to be here!" For when the
hounds cross this country there are always "wigs on the green" in
abundance; and in spite of barbed wire we may still sing with Horace,

"Nec fortuitum spernere caespitem
Leges sinebant,"

which, at the risk of offending all classical scholars, I must here
translate: "Nor do the laws allow us to despise a chance tumble on
the turf."

Round Oaksey, too, is a rare galloping ground. Should you be lucky
enough to get a start from "Flistridge" and come down to the brook at a
jumpable place, in less than ten minutes you will be, if not _in_
Paradise, at all events as near as you are ever likely to be on this
earth. This is literally true, for half way between "Flistridge" and
Kemble Wood, and in the midst of Elysian grass fields, is a narrow strip
of covert happily christened "Paradise."

Would that there was a larger extent of this sort of country, for it is
not every Friday that hounds cross it! The duke's hounds have a happy
knack of crossing it occasionally on a Monday, however, and on Thursdays
Mr. Miller's hounds may drive a fox that way.

This district is not so easy for a stranger to ride his own line over as
the Midlands; it is not half so stiff, but it is often cramped and
trappy. But then you must "look before you leap" in most countries
nowadays. In this Friday country wire is comparatively scarce. The
fields run very large on this day,--qu