Some countries never ride really deep.  The shires, for instance, though often said to be deep, will seldom let a horse in to any great extent—­the ridge and furrow drains the field so well; and in that sort of deep ground which is met with in Leicestershire a thoroughbred one will gallop and “stay” all day.  But a ride in Braydon or in the Bicester “Claydons” will convince us that a stouter stamp of horse is necessary to combat a deep, undrained clay country.

We must now leave the sporting Thursday country of the V.W.H. and turn to Friday.

Eastcourt, Crudwell, Oaksey, Brinkworth, Lea Schools—­such are some of Lord Bathurst’s Friday meets; and the pen can hardly write fast enough in singing the praises of this country.  Strong, well-preserved coverts, sound grass fields, flying fences, sometimes set on a low bank, sometimes without a bank, varied by an occasional brook, with now and then a fence big enough to choke off all but the “customers”—­such is the bill of fare for Fridays.  To run from Stonehill Wood, via Charlton and Garsdon, to Redborn in the duke’s country, as the hounds did on the first day of 1897, is, as “Brooksby” would say, “a line fit for a king, be that king but well minded and well mounted.”

Stand on Garsdon Hill, and look down on the grassy vale mapped out below, and tell me, if you dare, that you ever saw a pleasanter stretch of country.  How dear to the hunting man are green fields and sweet-scenting pastures, where the fences are fair and clean and the ditches broad and deep, where there is room to gallop and room to jump, and where, as he sails along on a well-bred horse or reclines perchance in a muddy ditch (Professor Raleigh! what a watery bathos!), he may often say to himself, “It is good for me to be here!” For when the hounds cross this country there are always “wigs on the green” in abundance; and in spite of barbed wire we may still sing with Horace,

     “Nec fortuitum spernere caespitem
      Leges sinebant,”

which, at the risk of offending all classical scholars, I must here translate:  “Nor do the laws allow us to despise a chance tumble on the turf.”

Round Oaksey, too, is a rare galloping ground.  Should you be lucky enough to get a start from “Flistridge” and come down to the brook at a jumpable place, in less than ten minutes you will be, if not in Paradise, at all events as near as you are ever likely to be on this earth.  This is literally true, for half way between “Flistridge” and Kemble Wood, and in the midst of Elysian grass fields, is a narrow strip of covert happily christened “Paradise.”

Would that there was a larger extent of this sort of country, for it is not every Friday that hounds cross it!  The duke’s hounds have a happy knack of crossing it occasionally on a Monday, however, and on Thursdays Mr. Miller’s hounds may drive a fox that way.