98 HORNS, HOLLOAS, DOG LANGUAGE 



and have had, I suspect, the effect of producing these 

 remarks. Who has not read of Mr. Richard Bragg, 

 the swell huntsman in Soapey Sponge ? Who has not 

 laughed at him, yet loathed him ? Surtees is, as usual, 

 inimitable in his picture of that insufferable impostor. 

 He introduces him thus with his hounds : — 



" They were just gliding noiseless over the green sward, Mr. Bragg 

 rising in his stirrups as spruce as a gamecock, with this thoroughbred 

 bay gambolling and pawing with delight at the frolic of the hounds, some 

 clustering round him, others shooting forward a little, as if to show how 

 obediently they would return at his whistle. Mr. Bragg was known as 

 the whistling huntsman, and was a great man for telegraphing and 

 signalling with his arms, boasting he could make hounds so handy 

 that they could do everything except pay the turnpilve gates." . . . 

 " ' Yo-o-icks — wind him! Yo-o-icks — pash him up !' cheered Bragg, 

 cracking his whip and moving slowly on. He then varied the enter- 

 tainment by whistling in a sharp, shrill key, something like the chirp of 

 a sparrow-hawk." 



His fox breaks cover, then " Bragg's queer tootle of 

 his horn, for he teas full of strange blows, now sounded 

 at the low end of the covert " — and so the run began. 



I remember a certain farmer huntsman who most 

 decidedly was an vmdeniable sportsman, although his 

 methods Avere strictly unorthodox. He would march 

 round the outskirts of a covert with his pack — his 

 hounds were said to be of old Irish breed — uttering 

 a queer " burring " noise. If the hounds broke away 

 and entered the gorse the fox was there, or had 

 just left it ; if they did not it was assumed that no 

 fox was there, and the huntsman departed to draw 

 elsewhere. But I proved to my ow^n satisfaction one 

 day, and to his great annoyance, that though the 



