“Oh! I grant you that,” said the old gentleman. “A fox is a speedy animal himself, and it stands to reason that if you are to catch him, you must some time or another go faster than he does. But haste is not always speed. A man may be in a devil of a hurry, and yet slip two paces backwards for every one he advances. The same process that kills a hare will kill a fox. The keeping constantly _at_ him, not the bustling him along best pace for ten or fifteen minutes. Now, your hounds of the present day are always flashing over the scent into the next field. Either you waste a deal of valuable time by having to try back; or if your huntsman is as wild as his hounds, he gallops forward blowing his horn, makes a wild cast, and loses him altogether. Either way you destroy your own object, which I take to be the enjoyment of _riding_ in a gallop with hounds that are running with their noses down, and the enjoyment of _hunting_ by seeing the sagacity of a close-working pack, persevering through difficulties, and rewarded with a kill. “I’m an old fogey, I grant you, Mr. Softly. If I do ever go out to look at the hounds, it’s on a pony; and I can no more see, the way ‘Jem’ there goes, than I can fly; but let me tell you, I could have beat his head off, and given him two stone of weight into the bargain, when I was his age. It’s not that I want hounds to stay behind with _me_, that makes me say they’re bred too fast nowadays: far from it. I like you young fellows to enjoy yourselves, and have brushing gallops, and comb your whiskers well out in the bullfinches, and sew up your horses and come home, and drink ‘fox-hunting.’ Ring the bell, Jem; we’ll have another bottle of that claret. I think I know what riding is, if I haven’t forgotten it. You see that dark-brown horse over the fire-place? That’s a good likeness, Mr. Softly; and that was the best horse I ever had in my life.” Raising my eyes in obedience to my host’s behests, they rested on a picture enclosed in a most gorgeous frame, representing a brown horse with rather a long back and wonderfully short legs; his tail reduced to the smallest dimensions, and his ears, so to speak, at full cock. This animal, in the highest possible condition, and with every muscle standing out from its body to a rigid degree of tension, was depicted in the centre of a flowery mead, over-shadowed by large trees in their densest summer foliage, gazing fixedly at a red-brick mansion, on the further side of a sheet of water which had by no means found its own level, but was represented in the abnormal condition of covering the side of a slope. I gazed with admiration not unmixed with astonishment. Delighted with the obvious impression, my host went on:—