BIOGRAPHIES IN A NUTSHELL 147 



authorities served Mr. Assheton - Smith with a 

 notice forbidding him to draw it. After a time, 

 however, the tempers of each cooled down. The 

 Squire was readmitted to South Grove Covert on 

 sufferance, and the two Tom Smiths became firm 

 and fast friends. Six months after his surrender 

 of the Craven in 1833 Mr. Smith married, for the 

 second time, Miss Denison, of Ossington, the sister 

 of Mr. Evelyn Denison, the Speaker of the House 

 of Commons, and we do not hear of him again in 

 connection with hounds till he accepted the 

 Mastership of the Pytchley, to which I have already 

 alluded. On retiring from the Pytchley country 

 he went on a Continental tour, when he received 

 numberless attentions from the foreign nobility on 

 account of his fame as a sportsman. On his 

 return he went back to the Hambledon country, 

 which he hunted till the 3rd of April, 1852, when the 

 meet was at Broadhalfpenny. It was known to 

 be his good-bye day, and all sporting Hampshire 

 was out. As a sportsman Mr. Smith might well 

 have taken the motto, " Nulli secundus." Fox- 

 hunting was the sport he loved best, but he was 

 also a first - rate cricketer, an experienced otter 

 hunter, and could kill a salmon with Sir Humphry 

 Davy. He was also an excellent draughtsman, as 

 witness the illustrations to his own books, and had 

 a taste for mechanics, having invented a threshing 

 machine in his younger days ; and he was such a 

 good farmer that he realised the highest prices 



