‘The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength and skill.’ So homeward I go through a labyrinth of fir-stems and, what is worse, fir-stumps, which need both my eyes and my horse’s at every moment; and woe to the ‘anchorite,’ as old Bunbury names him, who carries his nose in the air, and his fore feet well under him. Woe to the self-willed or hard-hided horse who cannot take the slightest hint of the heel, and wince hind legs or fore out of the way of those jagged points which lie in wait for him. Woe, in fact, to all who are clumsy or cowardly, or in anywise not ‘masters of the situation.’ Pleasant riding it is, though, if you dare look anywhere but over your horse’s nose, under the dark roof between the red fir-pillars, in that rich subdued light. Now I plunge into a gloomy dell, wherein is no tinkling rivulet, ever pure; but instead a bog, hewn out into a chess-board of squares, parted by deep narrow ditches some twenty feet apart. Blundering among the stems I go, fetlock-deep in peat, and jumping at every third stride one of the said uncanny gripes, half hidden in long hassock grass. Oh _Aira cæspitosa_, most stately and most variable of British grasses, why will you always grow where you are not wanted? Through you the mare all but left her hind legs in that last gripe. Through you a red-coat ahead of me, avoiding one of your hassocks, jumped with his horse’s nose full butt against a fir-stem, and stopped, ‘As one that is struck dead By lightning, ere he falls,’ as we shall soon, in spite of the mare’s cleverness. Would we were out of this! Out of it we shall be soon. I see daylight ahead at last, bright between the dark stems. Up a steep slope, and over a bank which is not very big, but being composed of loose gravel and peat mould, gives down with me, nearly sending me head over heels in the heather, and leaving me a sheer gap to scramble through, and out on the open moor. Grand old moor! stretching your brown flats right away toward Windsor for many a mile.—Far to our right is the new Wellington College, looking stately enough here all alone in the wilderness, in spite of its two ugly towers and pinched waist. Close over me is the long fir-fringed ride of Easthampstead, ending suddenly in Cæsar’s camp; and hounds and huntsmen are already far ahead, and racing up the Roman road, which the clods of these parts, unable to give a better account of it, call the Devil’s Highway. Racing indeed; for as Reinecke gallops up the narrow heather-fringed pathway, he brushes off his scent upon the twigs at every stride; and the hounds race after him, showing no head indeed, and keeping, for convenience, in one long line upon the track: but going heads up, sterns down, at a pace which no horse can follow.—I only hope they may not overrun the scent.