ur
jog-trot to suit. It is the Wold fashion to ride farming at a pretty
good pace, and take the fences in a fly where the gate stands at the
wrong corner of the field. Broad strips of turf fringe the road,
offering every excuse for a gallop, and our guide continually turned
through a gate or over a hurdle, and through half a dozen fields, to
save two sides of an angle. These fields contrast strangely with the
ancient counties--large, and square, and clean, with little ground lost
in hedgerows. The great cop banks of Essex, Devon, and Cheshire are
almost unknown--villages you scarcely see, farmhouses rarely from the
roadside, for they mostly stand well back in the midst of their acres.
Gradually creeping up the Wold--passing through, here vast
turnip-fields, fed over by armies of long-woolled Lincoln sheep; there,
stubble yielding before from a dozen to a score of pair-horse ploughs,
silent witnesses of the scale of Lincolnshire farming--at length we see
descending and winding along a bridle-road before us, the pied pack and
the gleam of the huntsman's scarlet. Around, from every point of the
compass the "field" come ambling, trotting, cantering, galloping, on
hacks, on hunters, through gates or over fences, practising their
Yorkshire four-year-olds. There are squires of every degree,
Lincolnshire M.P.'s, parsons in black, in number beyond average;
tenant-farmers, in quantity and quality such as no other county we have
ever seen can boast, velvet-capped and scarlet-coated, many with the
Brocklesby hunt button, mounted on first-class hunters, whom it was a
pleasure to see them handle; and these were not young bloods, outrunning
the constable, astonishing their landlords and alarming their fathers;
but amongst the ruck were respectable grandfathers who had begun hunting
on ponies when Stubbs was painting great-grandfather Smith, and who had
as a matter of course brought up their sons to follow the line in which
they had been cheered on by Arthur Young's Lord Yarborough. There they
were, of all ages, from the white-haired veteran who could tell you when
every field had been inclosed, to the little petticoated orphan boy on a
pony, "whose father's farm had been put in trust for him by the good
Earl."

Of the ordinary mob that crowd fox-hound meets from great cities and
fashionable watering-places, there were none. The swell who comes out to
show his clothes and his horse; the nondescript, who may be a fast
Life-Guardsman or