Four o’clock on a hunting morning usually found him preparing the inner man with a breakfast of underdone beef, with eggs beaten up in brandy to fill the interstices; and thus fortified he was ready for a fifty miles run. He was what Nimrod would have called, “a good rough rider” over the stiff Shropshire clays, and he generally managed to keep up with the best to the last; “Nicking and craning he deemed a crime, And nobody rode harder perhaps in his time.” He could scarcely “Top a flight of rails,” “Skim ridge and furrow,” or, charge a fence, however, with Phœbe Higgs, who sometimes accompanied him. Phœbe, who was a complete Diana, and would take hazardous leaps, beckoning Mr. Forester to follow her extraordinary feats, led the Squire to wager heavy sums that in leaping she would beat any woman in England. With Phœbe and Moody, and a few choice spirits of the same stamp on a scent, there was no telling to what point between the two extremities of the Severn it might carry them. They might turn-up some few miles from its source or its estuary, and not be heard of at Willey for a week. One long persevering run into Radnorshire, in which a few plucky riders continued the pace for some distance and then left the field to the Squire and Moody, with one or two others, who kept the heads of their favourites in the direction Reynard was leading, passed into a tradition; but the brush appears not to have been fairly won, a gamekeeper having sent a shot through the leg of the “varmint” as he saw him taking shelter in a churchyard—an event commemorated in some doggrel lines still current.