When I was a member of the Meadowbrook hunt, most of the meets were held within a dozen miles or so of the kennels; at Farmingdale, Woodbury, Wheatly, Locust Valley, Syosset, or near any one of twenty other queer, quaint old Long Island hamlets.  They were almost always held in the afternoon, the business men who had come down from the city jogging over behind the hounds to the appointed place, where they were met by the men who had ridden over direct from their country-houses.  If the meet was an important one, there might be a crowd of onlookers in every kind of trap, from a four-in-hand drag to a spider-wheeled buggy drawn by a pair of long-tailed trotters, the money value of which many times surpassed that of the two best hunters in the whole field.  Now and then a breakfast would be given the hunt at some country-house, when the whole day was devoted to the sport; perhaps after wild foxes in the morning, with a drag in the afternoon.

After one meet, at Sagamore Hill, I had the curiosity to go on foot over the course we had taken, measuring the jumps; for it is very difficult to form a good estimate of a fence’s height when in the field, and five feet of timber seems a much easier thing to take when sitting around the fire after dinner than it does when actually faced while the hounds are running.  On the particular hunt in question we ran about ten miles, at a rattling pace, with only two checks, crossing somewhat more than sixty fences, most of them post-and-rails, stiff as steel, the others being of the kind called “Virginia” or snake, and not more than ten or a dozen in the whole lot under four feet in height.  The highest measured five feet and half an inch, two others were four feet eleven, and nearly a third of the number averaged about four and a half.  There were also several rather awkward doubles.  When the hounds were cast off some forty riders were present, but the first fence was a savage one, and stopped all who did not mean genuine hard going.  Twenty-six horses crossed it, one of them ridden by a lady.  A mile or so farther on, before there had been a chance for much tailing, we came to a five-bar gate, out of a road—­a jump of just four feet five inches from the take-off.  Up to this, of course, we went one at a time, at a trot or hand-gallop, and twenty-five horses cleared it in succession without a single refusal and with but one mistake.  Owing to the severity of the pace, combined with the average height of the timber (although no one fence was of phenomenally noteworthy proportions), a good many falls took place, resulting in an unusually large percentage of accidents.  The master partly dislocated one knee, another man broke two ribs, and another—­the present writer—­broke his arm.  However, almost all of us managed to struggle through to the end in time to see the death.