Scotland, some years ago, before so much wire crept in, was as good a school as need be to teach anyone how to get to hounds. You sometimes had to crawl and creep, and sometimes to jump a bit of timber standing, perhaps uphill in a corner, or an awkward place under a tree, with generally a wire somewhere through it or standing handy by, and it is a great thing to _learn_ where there are difficulties, for it teaches you to use your head, which is as important out hunting as it is in daily life. Yet how few people seem to hunt with their heads. As long as they can gallop and jump in sight of someone else's coat tails, there are many who seem to be quite content, and will assure you they enjoy their hunting immensely. But this is not the _real_ way. To use your own judgment, to have a quick eye to hounds, and as they turn and swing to cut off the corners, to save your horse by choosing the weak places in the fences and the best going in the fields, this is the science of riding to hounds. Yet very few know how to do it, and fewer still have the gift of being able to make a horse gallop. In a crowded country where everything depends on your getting a start much also depends on this. To be _strong_ on a horse is given to few, to ride light to very few, and yet to be a really good horsewoman one ought to be both. It is pretty to see a really good man or woman riding to hounds. How they keep flitting along to one side of the pack, never seeming in a hurry, but always moving on, down the furrows and over the gaps, and those who try to catch them will find they are always in front and generally clean. One great thing to learn, and especially I think for a woman, is to go quietly and not to splash. One hates to see the women of a hunt always on the gallop, going from covert to covert across the fields. It looks so much better, and _is_ so much wiser to trot quietly over them than to go helter skelter past everybody else, probably squelching muddy water over them as you go, and incurring the condemnation of the opposite sex, who, if they are sportsmen of the right sort, will seldom be seen bustling between times. Not only to ride your horse quietly, but to _be_ quiet yourself is also an advantage. I shall never forget once in Leicestershire, after an almost blank day, the whole field was drawn up to one side of a small spinney by the road, and all our hopes of retrieving the day lay in our getting a fox away from the far corner of the wood. All who understood the importance of keeping quiet were dumb, and we could not help feeling a little bit bored by one good lady, who in strident tones gave an exhaustive history of her aluminium watch. Her listener would evidently have gladly cut her short had his manners been less good, and the rest of us wished heartily that both she and her watch were at the bottom of the sea. Poor lady, she hunted with the greatest regularity several days a week, but she had never learned the _why_ of things out hunting.