On the 29th December 1863, while staying with Sir Thomas Barrett Lennard, I had a heavy fall, nearly breaking my neck. I got away with hounds from one of the Belhus coverts, close on a fox. I was riding a thoroughbred mare on a snaffle, and she swerved from a small fence on to a high gate, jumping as she breasted it. We turned right over in the next field, my body remaining on the saddle while my head was twisted back between her feet, with one of which, in struggling to rise, she hit my head. I was taken to Belhus, and next morning, when my mother returned to see me, her look of horror made me crawl to the looking-glass after she had left the room. I had fallen on the crown of my head, and my neck had swollen till it protruded beyond the cheek-bones, giving the appearance of large double goitre. I hunted again three weeks later, at Dewlish, in Dorsetshire, when on a visit to General Sir John Michel, to whom I owed much in my career. I strolled into the King’s Arms, Dorchester, to look at the room where Clement, Stanley Clarke, and I messed in 1855, and hearing the hounds met at Dewlish next day, hired a cob. I had no riding-clothes, and in my skull-cap[95] presented an unusual figure on the lawn. We found in the home covert, and the hounds crossed a flight of rails, not high, but being strong, nearly all the field rode off at an angle to avoid them. I welcomed the chance of seeing if my fall had unnerved me, but when the pony went so close as to touch the rails with his knees as he rose, I felt my heart flutter; but he knew his work, and carried me well. I spent the summer vacation of 1864 visiting the battlefields of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. I had advertised, in the spring of the year, in leading German papers asking to be received into a German family for six weeks, stating that I was a student of the Staff College. I selected one of the more expensive offers, and went to Dresden. On my arrival, I received a letter from Monsieur Delissert, who was my tutor at Sunbury in 1861. He had become proprietor of a school at Ouchy, in Switzerland, the pupils being nearly all Germans, and invited me to join him on a holiday walking tour. My acceptance of the offer precluded the possibility of my staying at Dresden, and my prospective host courteously offered me the assistance of his son, a young man who spoke no English, for a short walking tour, which I carried out in the Saxon Switzerland. At Heidelberg in 1862, and at Dresden in 1864, I paid or was asked to pay only half the sum I expended for my sons a quarter of a century later, but it is right to state they were better accommodated and boarded.