64 British Dogs. 



or so in height ; and, besides his doings at home with the Holderness, 

 he has also carried his banner to the fore amongst the crack riders, and 

 at all the crack meets in the shires, from Lord Yarborough's at Cainby 

 Corner and the Quorn at Rolleston to Lord Chesterfield's at Bullock 

 Smithy. 



In January of 1836, a knot of twenty-one second horses, by a lucky 

 nick-in, gained the rising ground and caught a head view of the Belvoir 

 bitch pack pressing hard on a Piper Hole fox up the vale, near the close 

 of a fast forty-eight minutes ; the first flight being reduced to seven 

 horsemen, with Tom Goosey at the fag end. 



" Lord Forrester is leading them, on the grey," says Tom Chambers,, 

 alluding to a grey holding a centre lead of a good twenty lengths. Men- 

 tally, we had already claimed the grey as one of the Yorkshire contin- 

 gent ; and, biding our time, as he led down the swede ridges, and closely 

 scanning his charge at the ox-fence too stiff to bend and too tough to 

 break we caught the certainty, and broke out: "It's the Lord of 

 Holderness that's on the grey, my lads ; and all the lords in Leicester- 

 shire can't catch him!" Nor could they! And when the fox was 

 pulled down, two fields ahead, there were only three claimants up 

 for the twenty-one fresh horses at hand, the noble lord above alluded 

 to not being one of them. Will. Goodall was second whip on .that 

 day; and when he took the horn in 1842 he reduced the Belvoir 

 standard from twenty-four to twenty-three inches, and in the season 

 of 1854 he killed one hundred and ten foxes in one hundred and 

 twelve days. 



"We don't call foxhounds dogs" was the crusty retort of Tom 

 Parrington, the Yorkshire secretary to a Craven scut-hunter, on the eve 

 of the Skipton hound show. But, with all due deference to the cherished 

 reservation of the mighty mentor, we not only call the foxhound a dog, 

 but the dog of dogs, and premise that, from a national point of view, 

 foxhounds are of more importance than all other breeds of dogs clubbed 

 together. 



We have weekly records of hunting appointments, from 167 packs 

 of foxhounds in Great Britain and Ireland, which collectively engage to 

 hunt about five hundred and forty days a week, besides which we are 

 cognisant of several other established packs of foxhounds not included 

 in the lists, and probably six hundred hunting days a week would be 



