With the common run of fences, where the grip is from you, go faster at them than when it lies on the side you take off from. When they consist of live thorns and quicks newly laid down, take them, whenever the chance presents itself, _aslant_, rising where the top of the thorn is laid, as being the least capable of holding your horse’s knees, should they catch in rising at it. In your noviciate it is hardly necessary to offer you any advice as to water. As a general rule, however, it may as well be said here as elsewhere that, in brook-jumping, pace comes first and then judgment. With a powerful impetus you get over; should your horse blunder, somehow--if with a fall at the other side, no matter: less speed enables you to pick your ground better, but it throws all the odds on the side of a cold-bath, should the span be wider than you calculated on, or the bank be soft, and let you in. Never take hold of your horse’s head till you feel that he is safely landed; if there is a scramble for it, and you pull at him but an ounce, it may turn the beam of his equipoise, and in you go together. Young hands are prone to think that it is necessary to the acquisition of the reputation of a sportsman that they show in front throughout a run. Indeed I might have said this idea seems to hold with many who ought to be wiser. The sooner the youthful Nimrod discards this fallacy the better. The chances are so multiplied and various against a good run that it is next to a miracle how a real clipper ever occurs. From foil, to which ground is every where exposed, down to an infant of three years old that heads your quarry, on every side you are beset with risk, even _with_ a scent. Without it your difficulty becomes almost an impossibility, and that is the time when over-riding, more fatal than all other obstacles put together, is to be seen in its superlative degree. There is your hard-rider, _par excellence_, who _will_ be first: the leader pulls up at a check--the nuisance passes him, even with hounds at fault, without a moment’s care for the mischief he must do the chase, or what he may do himself. Let such as this teach you that which you should avoid: acquire in youth the way you should go, and in your maturity you will not depart from it.