54 THE ESSEX FOXHOUNDS. 



owned some property about Droxford. At any rate, our 

 future master would not have kept harriers ahnost before 

 he was out of his teens had there been no money forth- 

 coming, nor, one would think, would he have travelled 

 so far from home as the Thurlovv country, in Suffolk and 

 Cambridgeshire, of which he became master about the 

 year iSoo, in succession to Mr. Wilson, who for a year 

 or two seems to have hunted the country given up by 

 the somewhat eccentric Mr. Thomas Panton, of Newmarket, 

 an owner of race horses and Master of the game to the 

 King. 



Colonel (then Mr.) Cook, took up his abode in a 

 cottage opposite the " Cock," at Thurlow, and during his 

 stay in that country married Lord Eldon's niece, a Miss 

 Surtees, daughter of Mr. A. Surtees, of Newcastle-upon- 

 Tyne. There has always, from the earliest days, been a 

 difficulty in hunting the Newmarket and Thurlow country, 

 and so the young master discovered at the beginning of the 

 century. To use his own forcible expression, he lound 

 " foxes and subscriptions damnably short," so shaking the 

 Thurlow dust from his feet he went back to his native 

 county, Hampshire, where, in the year 1804, he became 

 master of the Hambledon Hunt in succession to Mr. 

 Thomas Butler, the first master of the Hunt, which was 



