roadside inns, now desolate, or turned into
granaries, boarding-schools, lunatic asylums,
had been brought to perfection (for bachelors)
by constant traffic. If you were not able to hit
a great hotel, there were small publics patronised
by graziers, with "accommodation for
man and beast" sufficient. There were adventures,
too—not highwaymen, they had gone out
with the preceding generation—pleasant
acquaintances were made, and unsuspected charms
in the way of sport and scenery were discovered.
But there were also, it must be admitted,
drawbacks which few men over thirty would willingly
encounter without some real object. Long rides
at a footpace on dark dirty nights, on a tired
lame horse; inns full of drovers and butchers
attending a fair; no stable-room; your saddle,
or perhaps your horse, borrowed in the morning;
and an attack of ague, fever, or rheumatism,
as the reward of your enterprise and preference
for a horse-ride to seats in the Tally-ho or
Tantivy.

Boswell, writing just a hundred years ago to
his friend Temple, of a journey to and from
Glasgow, says: "I shall chaise it all the way
—thanks to the man who first invented the
comfortable method of journeying! Had it
not been for that, I dare say both you and
I would have circumscribed our travels within
a very few miles. For my own part, I think
to dress myself in a great-coat and boots, and
get astride a horse's back, and be jolted through
mire, perhaps through wind and rain, is a
punishment too severe for all the offences I
can charge myself with."

For these reasons it would be a waste of space
to say more about the gentleman's roadster, an
animal as extinct as a four-horse coachman.
The cover hack is the nearest representative
of the roadster hack of our grandfathers; but
the spread of macadamising principles, the
consequent inclination to use wheels, and the
extension of railroads, have had their effect on
the numbers of that once indispensable part
of a hunting-stud. At one of the crack meets
in the Pasture counties at the present day,
you do not see one-tenth of the number of
genuine cover hacks that came rattling from
all points of the compass thirty years ago,
when Sir Charles Knightley and Sir Tatton
Sykes were the first-flight men of their respective
counties. Deduct those who come in one
of the many varieties of cart, phaeton,
waggonette, drag, and brougham—those who make
a hunter do hack's work at all near meets—
those who use a nondescript general-utility
animal, as familiar with a collar as a saddle—
those who make their London luxury, the Park
hack, do duty in the country (as one of the
oldest and most famous masters of the Quorn
often did), and the residuum of real cover hacks
will be found very small.

A perfect cover hack should be able to walk
nearly five miles (towards home), trot at least
twelve miles, and gallop twenty miles, within the
hour, with ease to himself and comfort to his rider.
But there are famous hacks that only canter and
gallop, and one of the best and handsomest we
ever knew could walk five miles and trot seventeen
miles an hour (like oil); but galloped like a
camel, rolling and labouring every yard. She
was bred between a Welsh pony and a thoroughbred
horse.

Pace is essential, because those who ride cover
hacks are sure to be late and in a hurry; but
easy elastic action, only to be found in well-
shaped well-bred animals, is equally essential,
because you desire to arrive as fresh as possible
after your bustle to cover-side, and above all to
enjoy the change from a tired hunter to a fresh
hack, and glide, as it were, towards home.

A perfect cover hack can jump pretty well,
especially stiff timber, creep through cramped
places, and lead over impossible places, and then
he is quite equal to a dog with harriers or to carry
your eldest hope to foxhounds.

The luxury of the age in horseflesh is the
Park hack, ridden daily for pleasure only,
capable, if perfect, of doing a long day's journey
well; but that is not essential, as he is seldom
required to go more than five or six hours
at a moderate pace. The true Park hack must
be handsome in a picturesque point of view,
which is quite different from the handsomeness
of a hunter—as different as the ideal form of
Mars and Apollo—easy in every motion and
pace, full of courage, yet with the sweetest
temper, silky, elastic, graceful. Mares are
admitted among perfect hacks, and are often
more beautiful, though less to be depended on,
than geldings. The latter are, all other things
being equal, preferred.

The statesman, the great lawyer, the surgeon
of European reputation, the capitalist on whose
signature miles of railroads and acres of docks
all over the world are constructed—the
journalist, whose brains are to him both capital
and power—all the hard workers whose means
permit and tastes allow—all the army of pleasure-
seekers who work hard at amusement—all the
gatherers and distributors of wealth may find in
a perfect Park hack a luxury, a rest, a healthy
excitement, a pleasant fatigue, a medium for
grave or serious converse, for light lively gossip,
tor making love, for making friends, for patching
up quarrels, for selling bargains, or arranging
political combinations, which the old-fashioned
squire, the provincial manufacturer, and the
turf man who never rides, and who looks on
horses as mere machines for betting on, cannot
understand, and therefore despise. A fine form
and elegant manners are indispensable in the
Park hack. A hunter may have a plain head
and a rat tail, may be a stumbling slug on the
road, or a hard puller in the field, but if he
fence brilliantly, and can gallop, and live
through a first-class run in a first-class country,
he will command a long price, because all minor
faults are forgiven in consideration of his
perfection in his trade.

The following sketch of the Park hack is from
the pen of one of the most fashionable dealers
and finest horsemen of Piccadilly:—The Park
hack should have, with perfection of graceful