Of course the country in the shires makes up for almost anything, and to stride away over the pasture lands of Leicestershire or Pytchleydom, is truly the realisation of the "Happy Hunting Grounds." After you have once learned to find your way over a cramped country, intersected with lime and mortar walls and barbed wire, in Scotland, or after you have scaled the heights and fathomed the depths of the banks and drains in Ireland, then to go down for a hunt in the shires is a holiday worthy of the name. "Call this a ditch?" you exclaim inwardly as you flick over an English fence, after encountering those gruesome dykes in Meath. True, I only hunted in Meath one season, but my private verdict at the end of the time was, "a splendid education, but an awful experience as far as the fences are concerned." But then I do not like a ditch I cannot see the bottom of, especially when it has sheer cut-out sides which every person in front of you makes bigger and bigger. I also have a vivid recollection of seeing several top hats (nothing else) wandering up and down on the level of the ground, as other brave souls went at those ditches and cleared them and their contents, human, equine and all. This was on a pleasant spot in Meath, known as the "Bush Farm," and I don't mind saying that for appalling fences I have never met its equal, and devoutly trust I may never come in contact with its superior, unless I am mounted either on a bird or a balloon. But for sport it was undefeated, and the beautiful old turf was a pleasure to ride on. A great blessing too it is having no ridge and furrow, for really sometimes in England, the Bay of Biscay "is jokes" compared to the ground you ride over. The continued galloping up and down is so hard on horses, and though of course one knows the dodge of taking them slantways, still it is not half such fun as swinging away over smooth grass. One thing about Ireland--and when I say Ireland, I am thinking only of the county Meath, for I have never hunted with any other pack over there, barring one day in Kildare--is that a pony can get over it. It will creep about and jump like a cat, and cross the country as it never could in England. Then, too, people do not seem to hurt themselves so often when they fall over there, and that no doubt is because they ride _slowly_ at their fences, but then how one misses the gates. It is almost impossible to believe at first that there really are not any, but the cruel fact is proved time after time, till at last you are forced to own that it is only too true.