The _sheltie_, or pony of the Shetland isles, is a very diminutive animal, sometimes not more than thirty inches high, and rarely exceeding thirty-eight. He is often exceedingly beautiful, with a small head, good tempered countenance, a short neck, fine towards the throttle, shoulders low and thick—in so little a creature far from being a blemish—back short, quarters expanded and powerful, legs flat and fine, and pretty round feet. These ponies possess immense strength for their size; will fatten upon almost any thing, and are perfectly docile. Mr. Youatt says that one of them, three feet in height, carried a man of twelve stone forty miles in one day. Pony hunting used to be one of the favourite amusements of the Welsh farmers and peasantry a century and a half ago, and it has not even now fallen altogether into disuse. The following story of one of these expeditions is related in the Cambrian Quarterly Magazine:— “A farmer, named Hugo Garonwy, lived in the neighbourhood of Llewyn Georie. Although he handled the small tilt plough, and other farming tools in their due season, yet the catching of the merlin, the fox, and the hare, were pursuits more congenial to his tastes; and the tumbles and thumps which he received, and from which no pony hunter was exempt, served but to attach him to the sport. Rugged, however, as were the Merioneddshire coast and its environs, and abounding with precipices and morasses, the hunter sometimes experienced worse mishaps, and so it happened with Garonwy. “He set out one morning with his lasso coiled round his waist, and attended by two hardy dependents and their greyhounds. The lasso was then familiar to the Welshman, and as adroitly managed by him as by any Gaucho on the plains of South America. As the hunters climbed the mountain’s brow, the distant herd of ponies took alarm—sometimes galloping onwards, and then suddenly halting and wheeling round, snorting as if in defiance of the intruders, and furiously pawing the ground. Garonwy, with the assistance of his servants and the greyhounds, contrived to coop them up in a corner of the hills, where perpendicular rocks prevented their escape. “Already had he captured three of the most beautiful little fellows in the world, which he expected to sell for £4 or £5 each at the next Bala fair, to him a considerable sum, and amounting to a fourth of the annual rent which he paid for his sheep walk. There remained, however, one most untamable creature, whose crested mane, and flowing tail, and wild eye, and distended nostril showed that he was a perfect Bucephalus of the hills; nor, indeed, was it safe to attack him in the ordinary way. Many of the three year olds had been known to break the legs of their pursuers, and some had been dismounted and trampled to death.