A description of a fox-hunt is not very agreeable either to read or to write,—firstly, because it records a series of events of no very great importance when they are over; and secondly, because the picture generally bears the appearance of exaggeration; the reason being, that it is composed of two parts, one of which it is almost impossible accurately to delineate. The danger or difficulty which a man and horse incur in taking any particular leap depends on the one hand upon the size of the fence, and on the other upon the combined amount of weight, strength, and activity which the horse can bring up to it. In trade, if a given weight, whether small or great, be put into one scale, it can be at once over-balanced by putting a still greater weight into the other scale. But while the dimensions of a fence can accurately be measured, it would be not only very difficult to determine the physical powers of a hunter, but, even if the statement could be made, ninety-nine people out of every153 hundred would most certainly disbelieve it; for, as the old proverb says, "seeing is believing;" so when a man has ridden a horse across his farm for many years, he is fully persuaded that,—to use another common expression,—"he knows what he is made of." But the truth is, he only knows what he has done, and what he can do under the maximum of excitement he hitherto has ever experienced; what he does not know, and indeed what without trial he can have no idea of, is the enormous amount of latent physical power in his horse which even the sight of hounds will develop.  
For instance, in riding a hack along the road, the confidence or, as it may be termed, the courage of the rider depends not on himself, but on the strength and action of the animal he is bestriding. If the nag picks up his feet quickly, and pops them down firmly—if he goes stout in his canter and strong in his gallop, his owner rides boldly. If, however, the very same hero crosses a poor, weak, weedy animal, with strait action, tripping in all his paces, and with his toes sending almost every loose stone rolling on before him, he declares the instant he dismounts that he has been frightened; which difference, in truth, only means that, on trial, he has satisfactorily and unsatisfactorily ascertained the physical powers of the first horse to be amply sufficient, and those of the last totally insufficient, to perform the given amount of work he requires. Now it is really no exaggeration to say, that the excitement 154to a horse caused by the presence of hounds creates in his physical powers as wide a difference as exists between those of the two nags just described. The old, jaded, worn-out, "groggy" hunter, who came hobbling out of his stable, and who has been fumbling and blundering under his groom along the road, no sooner reaches the covert side than, like a lion "shaking the dew-drops from his shaggy mane," he in a moment casts away the ills which flesh is heir to—in short, his prostrated powers suddenly revive; and accordingly it is on record, that in one of the severest runs with stag-hounds ever known in Essex, the leading horse was aged, twenty-two. Again, on the road, when a horse has travelled thirty or forty miles, he usually becomes more or less tired; whereas, during the ten or twelve hours that a hunter is out of his stable, he will, with the utmost cheerfulness, besides trotting more than that distance on the road, follow the hounds for many hours across a heavy country and large fences; and as it is well known that, in harness, a horse is less fatigued by trotting before a carriage on a hard macadamized road for forty miles than in dragging it through an earth road for ten, it would appear almost fabulous to state how many miles on the road, or especially on dry turf, could be performed by the amount of excitement, activity, and strength expended by a hunter during a long and severe day's work.
 
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For the foregoing reasons, if a man during summer rides his hunters, he will see a variety of fences which, as he quietly ruminates, he will pronounce to himself to be impracticable, simply because he can both see and feel that they are greater than the powers he is bestriding; and yet, when the trees are leafless and the hounds running, if he happens on the same horse to come to these very fences, he crosses them without the smallest thought or difficulty—not because he is excited (for the cooler he rides the better he will go), but because, while the height and breadth of each fence have not since he last saw them increased, the physical powers of his horse, developed by hunting, have been, to say the least, doubled. The scales which in summer had turned against him now preponderate in his favour; and accordingly Prudence, who but a few months before, with uplifted hand, had sternly warned him to "beware!" with smiling face and joyous aspect now beckons to him to "Come on!"
 
The feats which the mere skin and bones of a horse can perform during hunting are surprising. The comparatively small shin-bone of his hind legs will, without receiving the smallest blemish, smash any ordinary description of dry oak or elm-rail, and occasionally shiver the top of a five-barred gate, and yet, stra............