Great artists, indeed, boast that under such favourable circumstances, they can distinguish and criticise the performances of each individual of the pack: but for myself I confess that I never had either coolness or leisure for such details. By the time I have marked the best place in the next fence, chosen the soundest ridge, or the wettest furrow, by which to get there, given my hat a firm push down on my head, and arranged my four reins, which are apt to get confused together and entangled with the thong of my hunting-whip, in the manner I am accustomed to hold them, I have small attention to spare for anything else; and I have always been of opinion that the cheering to particular hounds in a rapid burst, from huntsmen and other professionals striving hopelessly to catch them, is the offspring of a vivid imagination, and a happy audacity in guess-work. This forward riding, however, to a man who means to ride at all, is decidedly the best method of crossing a country, both on the considerations of pleasure and profit. Horses take their leaps in a more collected form when they see none of their own species in front of them; the hounds create quite excitement enough in a hunter to make him do his utmost; while the emulation he conceives of his own kind is apt to degenerate into a jealousy, that makes him foolhardy and careless. Also a great amount of unnecessary exertion is entailed upon him, by being pulled off and set going again, which must be done repeatedly in a run by a man who follows another, however straight and well his leader may ride. Also, the sportsman’s nerves are spared much needless anxiety and misgiving. Can anything be more distressing than to see our front-rank man fall, in the _uncertainty_ he has attained on the further side of a thick fence, or cover it with an obvious effort and struggle? Caution whispers, we had better decline. Shame urges that “what one horse can do another can.” Self-esteem implores us not to fall back into “the ruck” behind. So we first of all check our horse from hesitation, and then hurry him from nervousness. The probable result is a “cropper,” with the additional disgrace of having been incurred at a place which the pioneer cleared easily, and an assumption, as unjust as it is unwelcome, that our horse is not so good as his. Now, in riding _for himself_ a man preserves his confidence till he is _in the air_. Should he be luckless enough to light in a chasm, he has at least the advantage of not being frightened to death in advance; and I am convinced that all the extraordinary leaps on record have thus been made by these forward horsemen, who, trusting dame Fortune implicitly, find that she nearly always pulls them through. With regard to the distance a horse can cover when going a fair pace and leaping from sound ground, even with thirteen or fourteen stone on his back, it is scarcely credible to those who have not witnessed it. Two- and three-and-thirty feet from footmark to