Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/203

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RUS IN URBE.
195

complete, is not without a little hunting-ground of its own. Mr. Blackman has laid out a snug enclosure, walled in on all sides and remote from observation, where man and horse may disport themselves with no more fear of being crowded and jostled than in Launde Woods or Rockingham Forest during the autumnal months. Here you will find every description of fence in miniature, neat and new and complete, like the furniture in a doll's baby-house—a little hedge, a little ditch, a little double, and a very little gate, cunningly constructed on mechanical principles so as to let you off easily should you tamper with its top bar, the whole admirably adapted to encourage a timid horse or steady a bold one.

All this is child's-play, no doubt—the merest child's-play, compared with the real thing. Yet there is much in the association of ideas, and a round or two over this mimic