Various - Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, August, 1880

Up the sandy hill we go, and out on the wide moors, covered with soft brown heather, which stretch away with hardly a break twenty miles south and east to Aldershot Camp or Windsor Forest. On the brow of the hill grows a mighty bush of furze which always goes by the name of "Miss Bremer's furze-bush." When the dainty Swedish novelist once came to gladden Eversley Rectory with her presence she told how she longed to see the plant before which Linnæus had fallen on his knees; and she walked up this selfsame hill and with eyes full of tears gazed on the prickly shrub with its mist of golden-colored, apricot-scented flowers. The old Hampshire proverb says, "When furze is out of flower kissing is out of fashion;" and, sure enough, there is not a month in the year in which you may not find a blossom or two among the green spines.

Now we cross a green road, the Welsh Ride, which in the autumn is covered with thousands of cattle making their way in great herds from the Welsh mountains and Devonshire pastures to the winter fairs round London. The drovers used to boast that they could bring their beasts all the way from Wales without once going off turf or through a turnpike. Now, alas! crowded cattle-trucks on the railway are fast superseding the old-fashioned, wholesome way of travelling, and we seldom have the autumnal air filled with the lowing of the herds, the barking of the attendant dogs and the shouts of the drovers on their sturdy Welsh ponies. But to-day the Welsh Ride looks gay enough, for it is dotted with little knots of horsemen in black or red coats using it as a short cut from Aldershot and Sandhurst. We turn off the moor into the shadow of the fir avenue that leads half a mile up to the park-gates. The ground, covered with a soft carpet of pine-needles and burrowed everywhere by the roots of the trees, gives off a hollow echo to the horses' clattering hoofs. The sombre avenue is alive in unwonted fashion to-day. Now we pass a group of pedestrians from the village; now a young farmer comes by on a half-broken colt which is to make its first acquaintance with the hounds; then a break with a big party from a country-house in Miss Mitford's village passes us with a gay greeting as it rattles on. A tiny nutshell of a pony-carriage full of babies comes trotting along, and its driver, poor Sheldon Williams, will make notes of the scene and put them into one of his clever hunting-pictures, little dreaming of the day when his early death will leave those babies penniless. Now a group of the redcoats we saw on the Welsh Ride overtakes us, and Sintram plunges and dances as a wild little thorough-bred comes up to our side. His master, who has already gained his Victoria Cross twice—first as a little lad in the trenches at Sevastopol, and again for desperate deeds of valor in the Indian mutiny—is to win yet further glory in 1879 at the head of the "flying column" in Zululand—Evelyn Wood, the most gallant and humane of all that gallant band.

The white park-gate is held wide open by a poor ne'er-do-weel in a shabby old red coat—John Ellis by name. How he gets his living no one knows, but if there is a meet of fox-hounds anywhere within ten miles, there he is sure to be, holding people's horses or ready at a gate for stray pennies and sixpences. There is usually such a hanger-on to every pack of hounds in England—one who travels immense distances on foot to turn up in unexpected places and get a few hard-earned shillings as his reward. We jog along under the magnificent silver firs, only to be equalled by those in the duke of Wellington's park at Strathfieldsaye, hard by; then up the lime avenue which borders the cricket-ground, where thirty years ago the most famous matches in Hampshire were played; and as we reach the iron gates leading up to the house our little knot of riders has swelled into a veritable cavalcade.

Down the drive we trot, past the stables, where the watch-dogs strain angrily at their chains and a little green monkey jibbers with rage and excitement, and in another moment we turn under the shadow of the great house up to the western door. Here all is life and bustle. Twenty or thirty carriages are drawn up by the widespreading lawn: grooms are holding horses ready for their masters, who are refreshing the inner man with cherry brandy and cold breakfast indoors. A tinkle of bells is heard as the duchess of Wellington drives herself up with her three ponies abreast, Russian fashion. Then a perfectly-appointed brougham, with a pair of magnificent cobs, stops in a corner, and a soldier-like foreigner in a red coat helps out a quiet-looking English lady wrapped up in furs. She slips them off as her groom leads up a priceless horse for her to mount, and in a moment is in the saddle, and will ride as straight as any man in the field to-day. Her husband, Count Morella, better known as the famous Carlist general Cabrera, whose strange and terrible history many years ago fascinated the gentle English heiress, now satisfies his war-like spirit by fox-hunting on the best horses that money can buy, and has settled down into a quiet English country gentleman.

The hounds have arrived before us. There they are—the beauties!—on the green grass, and we ride in among them to have a word with Tom Swetman the huntsman and good George Austin the whip, the latter of whom has given me a lead over many a fence. Gallant Tom! the bravest and gentlest of men, how little we thought that in a year or two we should never see your honest face again on earth! But you will be long remembered, though you are with us no more, and the story will be told for years to come of a day when the hounds ran into their fox on the South-western Railway. It was in a cutting fifty feet deep, with a tremendous fence at the top. Tom arrived just in time to see his hounds on the rails, with poor Reynard dead in their midst and the express train from Southampton speeding up the hill at fifty miles an hour. He crammed his horse over the great post and rails, down the almost perpendicular side of the cutting, whipped the hounds off, and, as the train rushed screaming by, rode out from under the very wheels of the engine and up the farther bank with his rescued pack.

But now our master, Mr. Garth, comes down the steps—a signal that we must no longer waste time talking with our neighbors, and like a good old friend he gives us a private programme of the way we shall draw. Stirrups are lengthened or shortened, girths tightened, restive horses led away to unobserved corners where their owners can try to mount without being seen by the assembled multitude. Sintram executes a war-dance on his hind legs, to the delight of some schoolboys in a wagonette, the terror of their fair companions and the extreme disgust of his mistress at having to practice the haute école before so large an audience. Ah, my poor Sintram! He danced once too often, and one fine day came to a sad end by falling backward and breaking his neck.

Tom now comes up to the master: "Shall we go, sir?"

"Yes—now, I think."

A crack of the whips and away trots Tom, followed by his splendid pack and his two whippers-in. Then comes the master, and we all crowd after them pell-mell with horses plunging and kicking, and as soon as we are fairly out in the open a kind of stampede takes place among the unruly young ones, and we see many an involuntary steeple-chase over the smooth green cricket-ground. Through the dark avenues of fir trees we canter to the temple, a little summerhouse on a promontory in the sea of wood that lies below, and we stand admiring the far blue distant view away to the Hogsback and the South Downs beyond Basingstoke as the hounds begin their work. There they are: you can see their twinkling tails as they draw the heather-covered slopes beneath us and disappear among the golden-brown bracken, while one of the whips plunges down after them and shakes a shower of amber leaves from the silver birches as he brushes past them.