288 ikiuGS of tbe 1bunting*jfielO 



' " But why don't you get another situation ? " 



'"Indeed and I must, gentlemen, for I cannot stand 

 it any longer ; but a place is hard to find nowadays. I 

 was some years huntsman to a pack of hounds in 

 County Carlow, but I can't go back there, for Ireland is 

 a lost country. If you can help me in finding a new 

 situation I will take it as a kindness." Promising to 

 help, if it were possible, we took leave of our ill-suited 

 friend, as clean, nice and well-mannered a servant as any 

 Master of Harriers might wish to have for a huntsman.' 



In the year 1881 Colonel Anstruther Thomson (he 

 bears that rank as commanding officer of the ist Fife- 

 shire Light Horse) brought together under his own 

 roof at Slough, during the Ascot week, two veteran celebri- 

 ties of the hunting-field whom he had long wished to 

 introduce to one another. They were the Rev. John 

 Russell, then aged eighty-six, and Mr J. H. Whyte 

 Melville, father of the novelist, and sometime Master of 

 the Fife hounds, who had just completed his eighty- 

 fourth year. Their host declared that it was the most 

 delightful meeting he ever witnessed. The two vener- 

 able sportsmen were the life and soul of the party, and 

 kept their listeners entranced by their vivid and racy 

 stories of the sport in which both had so signally dis- 

 tinguished themselve.s. 



Colonel Anstruther Thomson is now in his eighty- 

 first year, hale and hearty and vigorous, as might be 

 expected of a man with such grand physique, hardened 

 by long days in the saddle and the open air. And there 

 is not a sportsman in the three kingdoms, I am sure, who 

 will not join me in hoping that for years yet to come, we 

 may be able to say of this noble old King of the Chase, 

 ' The Thane of Cawdor lives, a prosperous gentleman.' 



