THE MAN WHO HUNTS AND NEVER JUMPS.

The British public who do not hunt believe too much in the
jumping of those who do. It is thought by many among the laity
that the hunting man is always in the air, making clear flights
over five-barred gates, six-foot walls, and double posts and
rails, at none of which would the average hunting man any more
think of riding than he would at a small house. We used to hear
much of the Galway Blazers, and it was supposed that in County
Galway a stiff-built wall six feet high was the sort of thing
that you customarily met from field to field when hunting in that
comfortable county. Such little impediments were the ordinary
food of a real Blazer, who was supposed to add another foot of
stonework and a sod of turf when desirous of making himself
conspicuous in his moments of splendid ambition. Twenty years ago
I rode in Galway now and then, and I found the six-foot walls all
shorn of their glory, and that men whose necks were of any value
were very anxious to have some preliminary knowledge of the
nature of the fabric, whether for instance it might be solid or
built of loose stones, before they trusted themselves to an
encounter with a wall of four feet and a half. And here, in
England, history, that nursing mother of fiction, has given
hunting men honours which they here never fairly earned. The
traditional five-barred gate is, as a rule, used by hunting men
as it was intended to be used by the world at large; that is to
say, they open it; and the double posts and rails which look so
very pretty in the sporting pictures, are thought to be very ugly