EOE- SHOOTING IN THE BALKANS 83 



follows ; ^ albeit the fact of there being such a thing 

 must have been known to old-time Englishmen, for 

 Horace alludes to it, and I dare say Xenophon too. 

 (If they had only, in our school-days, let us construe 

 the hunting part of his works, I daresay I should 

 have made more progress therewith than I ever did 

 with those wearisome Ten Thousand.) 



"Now go, Dinah, and see if you can find one of 

 those brown-coated little gentlemen, lying where the 

 covert is thickest, and peacefully working his little 

 white lower jaw backwards and forwards under his 

 black velvety muzzle, till the provender collected 

 during his morning's foraging is all duly disposed 

 of And, having found him, give him no peace till he 

 crosses the ridge. Now, hie in." 



The bitch, however, shows little desire to go. The 

 drag all round here is delightfully fresh, and she 

 revels in it for some minutes. Round and round she 

 circles, her stern lashing her sides; but at last the 

 circles grow wider and wider, and she disappears 

 from view. More and more faintly the sound of the 

 bell on her collar reaches my ears, and at last dies 

 away. All is still, — relatively, that is, for far up the 

 main valley I hear the sound of an axe. In two 

 directions cattle - bells break the silence, and still 

 farther away the monotonous droning of a herd- 

 boy's pipe sounds among the hills. It sounds exactly 

 like those used by the Indian samp-wallahs (snake- 

 charmers), and carries my thoughts back years, to 

 the days when we sat sweltering in the verandah to 



1 On Exmoor, the places where the red deer pass, especially through 

 the close high beech hedges, are locally known as "deer racks." These, 

 however, are visible enough, though to the uninitiated they appear very 

 small for the size of the animal that makes them. Vide chapter xvi. 



