On this first occasion, as you may see by the letter, your grandfather was out with him, and he had not been allowed to follow. But soon afterwards his great triumph occurred, at a meet to which he and Moggy went off one morning after breakfast, in the wildest spirits. Your grandfather did not go out that day; so one of the farmers who happened to be going was to give an eye to Master George, and see that he got into no trouble, and found his way home. This he did about three o’clock in the afternoon, bearing the brush in his hand, with his face all covered with blood, after the barbarous custom of those days. He had been in at the death; and the honest farmer recounted to us in the broadest Berkshire the wonders which he and Moggy had performed together; creeping through impossible holes in great fences, scrambling along ditches and up banks to the finish, when he had been singled out from outside the ring of horsemen and led up to the master, the late Lord Ducie, to be “blooded” by the huntsman, and receive the brush, the highest honour the boy foxhunter can achieve. And so it was with all our games and exercises, whether we were at football, wrestling, climbing, single-stick (which latter we were only allowed to practise in the presence of an old cavalry pensioner, who had served at Waterloo). He seemed to lay hold of whatever he put his hand to by the right end, and so the secret of it delivered itself up to him at once. One often meets with people who seem as if they had been born into the world with two left hands, and two left feet, and rarely with a few who have two right hands; and of these latter he was as striking an example as I have ever known. Often as a boy, and much oftener since, I have thought over this gift, trying to make out where the secret lay. For, though never very ambitious myself, I was more so than he was, and had the greatest wish to do every exercise and game as well as I possibly could; and by dint of real hard work, and years of practice, I did manage, in one or two instances, to reach the point which he had attained almost as it were by instinct. But I never could get nearer to his secret than this, that it lay in a sort of unconsciousness, which I believe to be natural courage. What I mean is, that what might possibly happen to himself never seemed to cross his mind: that he might get a fall and hurt himself, for instance, or get his head or his shins broken, or the like. And so, not being disturbed by any such considerations about himself, he had nothing to hinder him from just falling at once into the very best way of doing whatever he took in hand. Of course, even then, it required a fine body, as I have known boys and men, of equal natural courage, who were awkward and slow because they were very clumsily put together. But, on the other hand, I have known many men with equally fine bodies who never could get any decent work out of them. Now, with all the