“I hope you feel your arm a little easier, sir, this evening?” says Miss Lushington, reappearing in her own peculiar department, fresh and blooming from the revision of her toilet, which usually takes place about seven P.M. Miss Lushington’s habits are peculiarly regular and methodical; her attractions of a dazzling, not to say gaudy, description; she is a thorough woman of business, if indeed such a designation be not a contradiction in terms; but when she does take a day’s pleasure, there are few ladies who can produce a more satisfactory effect than Miss L.

I raise my eyes to reply with becoming gratitude. The object on which they rest is no everyday sight—a full-bodied, fresh-coloured, buxom damsel, with shining hair dark and lustrous as ebony, suggestive of no small expenditure in pomatum; a pair of light-grey eyes, restless and vivacious, called black by courtesy, because fringed with lashes of jet, and surmounted by arching eyebrows of the same colour, swarthy and strong of growth: a straight well-cut nose; a wide mouth, with red lips and white teeth, large, regular, and wholesome; not forgetting those captivating manners which spring from habitual good-humour and perfect self-possession in mixed society, backed by a pair of ear-rings that would have looked rich even on the Queen of Sheba. All this I take in at a glance for the twentieth time, and catch myself confessing, also for the twentieth time, that the barmaid of the Haycock Hotel and Posting-house, Soakington, is the most fascinating, as doubtless she is the most fastidious of her sex.

Miss Lushington, I need hardly observe, is no longer young. Barmaids of tender years, albeit extremely attractive to the usual frequenters of the snug locality over which they preside, cannot be expected to possess the aplomb with which mature experience and the rejection of many offers invest the lady of more autumnal charms. They are apt to be a little flurried by the attentions of the military, and somewhat over-excited by their anxiety for the commercial interest; also prone, if good-looking, to fly away and better themselves matrimonially and otherwise. But Miss L. is far above all such weaknesses as these. Not a red-coat in the whole British army could raise a corresponding hue in her cheek by the most ardent avowal of devotion; nay, even a cornet of Hussars (and I take an officer of that rank and service to be more at his ease in female society than other children of men) has been known to retire abashed and worsted from a little match at quiet persiflage with Miss Lushington. As for the commercial gents! why, though they worship the very keys she jingles, and the lemons in the nets above her head, they would no more think of proposing to her than to the mother of the Gracchi. I have often wondered what Miss Lushington’s early history can have been. Was she ever a little girl with long tails and frills above her ankles, swinging a slate to a day-school? Had she a mother, who washed her face, and scolded her, and taught her to sew, and eventually launched her on the boards of a minor theatre; for surely those majestic manners must have been acquired before the foot-lights? Was there ever a time that she came home wearied and saddened, pressing some girlish treasure to her heart, with a thrill, half joy, half pain, and looking along an endless vista in the future, containing a house, a garden, a pig, some rosy children, a couple of bee-hives, and a fresh-coloured young man at his tea. Was she ever young? or did she descend from her attic some fine summer’s day, this perfect and finished creature of for—well! of between thirty and forty, just as Minerva sprang ready-armed from the brain of Jove, or Venus wet and glowing, with nothing on but her shells, emerged from the blushing sea? I incline to the latter supposition. I believe that Caroline Lushington (of course, with that colour on her cheek, her name is sure to be Caroline; besides, I saw it on her workbox)—I say I believe that Caroline Lushington never was the least different from what she is now, and that I should always have been as much afraid of her as I am at this present moment. I am a shy man—not too shy to confess it. I blush to the lobes of my ears, in replying to her kind inquiries; but Miss L. does not laugh at me; for, woman-like, she has a prejudice in favour of shy men, and she pities my infirmities, and my arm in a black leather sling.

“Your tea will have drawn in five minutes, sir, and your toast is down at the fire now,” says she, patting and smoothing the cushions of her own particular arm-chair in her own particular corner, that I may sit at ease despite my injuries. How kind, how thoughtful she is! And heavens! what a torso the woman has! Though her dressmaker lives over the saddler’s, in the High Street, at Waterborough, that black satin fits as if it came direct from Paris. Even now, mixing a glass of brandy-and-water for a customer, the turn of her waist and the cling of her corset would drive an artist into ecstasies. I am no artist, yet I cannot but think of Alfred de Musset’s song about his Andalusian Marquesa, of which, as the language and the sentiments are both French, I need not write them down here.

Whilst the customer drinks and pays for his glass of brandy-and-water, it is high time that I should explain how I came to be domiciled in the bar of the Haycock Hotel and Posting-house, Soakington, with a contused shoulder, a broken collar-bone, and a black eye.

Since my earliest boyhood I have been enthusiastically fond of hunting. I am not a skilful horseman; I never was what is called a fine rider, perhaps not a forward one, though I have tried hard to think so; nor am I one of those who know about hunting (by the way, I have often wondered what it is they do know), but in ardent affection for the pursuit I yield to none. My godfather, one of the old Holderness lot, and not the worst of those hard-riding East-Riding undeniables, used to say of me, “The lad has a loose seat, and heavy hands, and not an over-quick eye, but his heart is in it. That’s what gives me hopes of him—his heart is in it!” And my godfather was right; my heart was in it. As a boy at school, I kept a few beagles, and ran with them on foot, imitating, as far as a biped can, the actions and motions of a horse. At Oxford, I was a regular attendant on the far-famed drag, and to this day can remember vividly the merits of a certain game little chestnut called Jumping Jemmy, whom I used to ride unmercifully at a pecuniary consideration which must have cost me less than a shilling a leap. J. J. could jump like a cat, and had carried too many of us ever to allow an undergraduate to throw him down. That I never took my degree is the less to be wondered at, when I remember my favourite course of literature, in which, unfortunately, the examiner never thought of gauging my proficiency. I could have taken a “double-first” in all poor Nimrod’s works, and could have repeated a page or two right on end from any part of the famous run in the “Quarterly,” knowing the exact places in which Lord Gardner said, “A fig for the Whissendine!” and Lord Brudenel heard a cracking of rails behind him, and could not identify the man in the ditch because “the pace was too good to inquire!”

So they plucked me; but I persevered in my course of study notwithstanding. Do I not know and love Jorrocks? If I could find out Soapy Sponge in the flesh, would I not ask him to come and stay with me, and feed him and mount him, and let him smoke as much as he liked in his bedroom? Nay, I think I would even have bought the piebald pony of him as a cover hack; for to ride either Sir ’Ercles or Multum-in-Parvo would have been beyond my highest aspirations. Nay, with all his absurdities and affectations, I have a sneaking kindness for the dismounted sportsman in “Ask Mamma” who hung his wet towel out at window on doubtful nights, though he had not a horse to his name, and was no more likely to go out hunting than if he had been bed-ridden. Yes, I like the whole thing—the hounds, the horses, the servants, the second-horse men, the splashes on my top-boots, the golden drops on the gorse covert, and the wreath of cigar-smoke curling upward into the mild soft air.

People talk about hunting going out; being on its last legs; civilised away before the advance of railroads, the march of intellect, &c. All this is sheer nonsense. There are more men hunt to-day than hunted twenty years ago, twice as many as hunted thirty, and probably ten times as many as hunted fifty years ago. Hounds run harder than they did in the time of our fathers; horses are better bred, better kept, better bridled, and better ridden. The country is also more enclosed, and there is consequently a deal more jumping, and more occasion for skill and quickness, than when High Leicestershire was an open upland, and Naseby field an unfenced marsh. The best of the old ones could not have gone “a cracker” in higher form than the dozen or so of men who may be seen any morning in the week with any of our crack packs of hounds in a quick thing; and in the “days of Old Meynell” there was a good deal more room for those who liked to try. It really is by no means an easy matter to thread a crowd of a hundred horsemen in a narrow lane, all going racing pace, and then to jockey the best ten or a dozen of these for the easiest place in the first fence. The actual feat of keeping near hounds when they run hard requires skill and quickness; but the difficulty is much enhanced when it has to be performed by a score of men where there is only comfortable space for five. It is a pleasant sensation, too, when the first impediment has been disposed of, and a man feels what the fast ones of the present day call “landed,” to sail away with the hounds, always supposing he is riding a hunter, and to feel that he will not now be interfered with till they check, but can do his own places at his own pace, without pulling his horse out of his stride, and gain all the advantages of seeing the hounds turn, while he has all the pleasure of watching them as they shoot across the fields, in swift, streaming line.

Great artists, indeed, boast that under such favourable circumstances, they can distinguish and criticise the performances of each individual of the pack: but for myself I confess that I never had either coolness or leisure for such details. By the time I have marked the best place in the next fence, chosen the soundest ridge, or the wettest furrow, by which to get there, given my hat a firm push down on my head, and arranged my four reins, which are apt to get confused together and entangled with the thong of my hunting-whip, in the manner I am accustomed to hold them, I have small attention to spare for anything else; and I have always been of opinion that the cheering to particular hounds in a rapid burst, from huntsmen and other professionals striving hopelessly to catch them, is the offspring of a vivid imagination, and a happy audacity in guess-work.

This forward riding, however, to a man who means to ride at all, is decidedly the best method of crossing a country, both on the considerations of pleasure and profit. Horses take their leaps in a more collected form when they see none of their own species in front of them; the hounds create quite excitement enough in a hunter to make him do his utmost; while the emulation he conceives of his own kind is apt to degenerate into a jealousy, that makes him foolhardy and careless. Also a great amount of unnecessary exertion is entailed upon him, by being pulled off and set going again, which must be done repeatedly in a run by a man who follows another, however straight and well his leader may ride. Also, the sportsman’s nerves are spared much needless anxiety and misgiving. Can anything be more distressing than to see our front-rank man fall, in the uncertainty he has attained on the further side of a thick fence, or cover it with an obvious effort and struggle? Caution whispers, we had better decline. Shame urges that “what one horse can do another can.” Self-esteem implores us not to fall back into “the ruck” behind. So we first of all check our horse from hesitation, and then hurry him from nervousness. The probable result is a “cropper,” with the additional disgrace of having been incurred at a place which the pioneer cleared easily, and an assumption, as unjust as it is unwelcome, that our horse is not so good as his. Now, in riding for himself a man preserves his confidence till he is in the air. Should he be luckless enough to light in a chasm, he has at least the advantage of not being frightened to death in advance; and I am convinced that all the extraordinary leaps on record have thus been made by these forward horsemen, who, trusting dame Fortune implicitly, find that she nearly always pulls them through. With regard to the distance a horse can cover when going a fair pace and leaping from sound ground, even with thirteen or fourteen stone on his back, it is scarcely credible to those who have not witnessed it. Two- and three-and-thirty feet from footmark to footmark and on a dead level have often been measured off. There are few fences in any country that would let us in, if we could trust to such a bound as this; and the activity displayed by a good horse, when he finds the ditch on the landing side wider than he calculated, is perhaps the noblest effort of the bodily powers of the animal.[2]

2.  In the Black Forest in Germany there are two stones standing to this day, sixty feet apart, to commemorate the leap made across a chasm by a hunted deer, attested by several sportsmen who were eye-witnesses of the wonderful and desperate effort.

Of course, we must fall sometimes. Of course, without that little spice of what we can hardly call danger, but which produces what we may safely call funk, it wouldn’t be half the fan it is. Going down, indeed! Look at the column of advertisements, weather permitting, in the Times; look at the price of hay and corn; look at the collector’s accounts of assessed taxes for saddle-horses (if you can get them); look at Poole’s trade in coats, and Anderson’s in breeches, and Peel’s (not Sir Robert’s) in boots. Why, the very shoemakers, though on foot, hunt regularly. So do the tradesmen and the farmers, and all the liberal professions; the army, the navy, the House of Commons, the Peers of the realm, her Majesty’s Ministers, and the principal Commissioner of the Court of Bankruptcy; nay, the heir to the crown is an enthusiastic sportsman, and an excellent rider; and so Floreat Diana! and God save the Queen!

Talking of falls brings me back to my broken collar-bone, and the bar of the Haycock. I must expl............