In the matter of riding at fences, with harriers you will be more enabled to suit your practice to the individual case than when you come to ride alongside fox-hounds. With the former, when any thing very cramp crosses your line, you may “look before you leap,” and this is no bad maxim, whoever may choose to sneer at it. Let this too be an axiom from which you never depart, as far as regards the hounds: when you are out with the jolly dogs, “hear and see, and say nothing”--so shall you earn golden opinions from the field in general, and prevent much out-pouring of wrath from the officials in particular. It will serve you to bear in mind that in almost every difficulty of ground a horse can serve himself better than you can assist him. I do not mean to say that in heavy, deep galloping you should not hold him together, and if there be a furrow or path at hand, that you should not give him the advantage of it. But in woodlands, for instance, where young timber has been felled, and the surface is covered with live stubs, give him his head: let him pick his own way; never touch his mouth with the bridle to guide him, and you will find how rarely he will give a chance away. Thus in a rabbit warren the difficulty is doubled by the nervous man who attempts to steer his horse. The biped is looking at one hole, the quadruped at another, and being diverted from the spot where he intended to place his foot, puts it _in_ where it was meant that he should not. Still, however, you may attempt it: never charge ground of this nature without using the precaution of slacking your pace. I remember a well-known bruising rider, who thought it impossible that he could be hurt, once trying the experiment over a warren in the neighbourhood of Whitchurch, in Shropshire, and being assured of the affirmative in the first hundred yards by the fracture of his collar-bone, and the dislocation of a shoulder.