liar style of horse, the first requisite
being that he shall be a very good and high timber jumper. Quite a
number of crack English and Irish hunters have at different times been
imported, and some of them have turned out pretty well; but when they
first come over they are utterly unable to cross our country, blundering
badly at the high timber. Few of them have done as well as the American
horses. I have hunted half a dozen times in England, with Pytchely,
Essex, and North Warwickshire, and it seems to me probable that English
thoroughbreds, in a grass country, and over the peculiar kinds of
obstacles they have on the other side of the water, would gallop away
from a field of our Long Island horses; for they have speed and
bottom, and are great weight carriers. But on our own ground, where
the cross-country riding is more like leaping a succession of five or
six-bar gates than anything else, they do not as a rule, in spite of
the enormous prices paid for them, show themselves equal to the native
stock. The highest recorded jump, seven feet two inches, was made by the
American horse Filemaker, which I saw ridden in the very front by Mr. H.
L. Herbert, in the hunt at Sagamore Hill, about to be described.

When I was a member of the Meadowbrook hunt, most of the meets were held
within a dozen miles or so of the kennels; at Farmingdale, Woodbury,
Wheatly, Locust Valley, Syosset, or near any one of twenty other queer,
quaint old Long Island hamlets. They were almost always held in the
afternoon, the business men who had come down from the city jogging over
behind the hounds to the appointed place, where they were met by the men
who had ridden over direct from their country-houses. If the meet was
an important one, there might be a crowd of onlookers in every kind of
trap, from a four-in-hand drag to a spider-wheeled buggy drawn by a pair
of long-tailed trotters, the money value of which many times surpassed
that of the two best hunters in the whole field. Now and then a
breakfast would be given the hunt at some country-house, when the whole
day was devoted to the sport; perhaps after wild foxes in the morning,
with a drag in the afternoon.

After one meet, at Sagamore Hill, I had the curiosity to go on foot over
the course we had taken, measuring the jumps; for it is very difficult
to form a good estimate of a fence's height when in the field, and five
feet of timber seems a much easier thing to take when sitting around the