last week’s frost is not thoroughly out of the ground, particularly just under the fences, and that the thaw which rejoiced us so exceedingly after dinner, has only succeeded in making the surface greasy, and not in rendering it soft. Ah! if we could always feel as we do for that glorious hour from about seven to eight P.M., when we stretch our napkin-covered legs towards the cheerful fire, blazing and crackling, and sparkling into rubies, as it reflects itself in our brimming glass of Bordeaux, what good fellows we should all be! how generous, how open-hearted, and how successful in our avocations and pursuits! The process of digestion, that highly important function, when properly performed, seems to endow us with all the most admirable qualities of manhood. We become conscious that we are possessed of sagacity, courage, humour, and general benevolence. We could lend a friend a hundred pounds willingly, _if we had it_. We could go the best run that ever was seen, on the very backs of the hounds, if that was only an actual existing country, which we trace in the glowing embers, instead of a dream of fairyland, the offspring of Newcastle coal and Château Lafitte. Then how we can converse on the inexhaustible topic, of “The Horse and how to ride him!” We are never tired of laying down the law “what to jump, creep, and avoid.” We do not believe we are deceiving ourselves, or our listeners, when we profess our partiality for high timber, or our proficiency and personal experience in water-jumping. We combine, in our heated imaginations, the “science of Meynell,” with the courage and dexterity of the late Mr. Assheton Smith. We believe, for the nonce, in many fallacies that our better judgment has so often proved to be such by the testimony of sad experience; to wit, that “if a horse can only gallop, he is sure to jump;” that, “what one hunter can clear, another can;” that, “if a man’s heart is in the right place, his horse is sure to carry him well with hounds:” and that, “large fences are the safest to ride at”—established positions which nobody thinks it worth while to dispute, laid down as they are by retired sportsmen, confirmed valetudinarians, and other non-hunting members of the community, but which to-morrow morning too clearly demonstrates to be mere after-dinner sentiments, unsafe to act upon, and in practice but a delusion and a snare.