The other horsemen had gone on, and were soon out of sight, and I was left in this situation upon the open down, a distance of two miles from my home. Seeing the deplorable state of my poor horse, and knowing, from the nature of the injury she had sustained, that it would be impossible to recover her, I determined to proceed on foot to my home, that I might send some proper person to release her from her misery; and I had gone some little distance on my road, when, on looking round, I found the poor creature hobbling after me, indicating, that it was her wish not to be left alone and abandoned in such a pitiable state. My heart bled for my faithful and noble beast, and I instantly attended to her apparent call upon my humanity. I took the rein, and she followed me home, nearly as fast as I could walk. When we[25] reached there, she was instantly relieved from her pain by the last sad resource, the fatal unerring ball, which, when directed by a skilful hand, produces instantaneous death, without a groan, or scarcely a convulsive struggle. I dropped a tear when she had breathed her last; consoled only by the reflection, that my life had been spared by a merciful and beneficent Creator; for had the poor animal fallen, at the swift pace she was going, my destruction must have been inevitable. What is very remarkable, I never before or since ever knew a horse break its legs, when going at full speed, without falling. But this noble animal, in the struggle, in the amazing effort to save herself from falling, when the bone of her right leg snapped, actually fractured the other. I had the fractured bones of both legs preserved, for the inspection of the curious, for many years afterwards. This sad accident was a great drawback to the pleasure that I had promised myself in the chase during the spring of the year, subsequent to my return from the King's Bench; and to add to my mortification and disappointment, the first time I mounted my next greatest favourite hunter, I found that it was brokenwinded. I had lent her, during my _residence in town_, (for it is a farce to call it imprisonment) to a gentleman of the name of Tompkins, who lived at Oakley House, near Abingdon; and he had returned it in the state which I have described, so that my hunting was spoiled for that season. Upon my being weighed it was not difficult to account for the lamentable fate of my lost favourite. I found that I had increased _two stone two pounds_ during my six weeks comparative inactivity in the King's Bench; for, although I had taken much more exercise than my fellow prisoner, Mr. Waddington, yet it was so very different from, and so much less than, that which I had been in the habit of taking when I was in the country, that I had increased in size and weight in the rapid manner which I have described; and to this increase must be attributed the melancholy accident which occurred to my unfortunate hunter.