332 HUNTING, ANCIENT AND MODERN 



live at Egerton Lodge than they did in later years, 

 and I have just seen in my December Baily that a 

 well-known sportsman believes the pace was better 

 in the Shires in 'Nimrod's' day than now, and that 

 they required faster horses in those days, when they 

 had no railroads and no wire-fencing to check the 

 progress of the horse, and no artificial manures or 

 deeply drained land to spoil scent for the hound. 

 Everything connected with the chase was slower, of 

 course, in the infancy of fox-hunting. ' When each 

 horse wore a crupper, each squire a pigtail ! ' — but 

 that is not the time which we ancients consider to 

 have been the halcyon period of the chase. Do you 

 imagine that any men go better to hounds now than 

 those who formed ' Nimrod's ' collection of ' The Hard 

 Riders of England ' ? Though I grant you that treble 

 the number of first-rate men are riding to hounds in 

 the present day. Then, as to hounds, I fancy most 

 M.F.H.'s of to-day would be glad to possess the pack 

 that ' The Squire ' brought with him into Leicestershire 

 in 1817 ; those that Mr. Foljambe sold in 1845, or 

 Lord Henry Bentinck's pack a decade later; while, 

 to come to more recent days, I imagine that the Duke 

 of Beaufort has not much improved on the pace or 

 hunting qualities of the pack with which he hunted 

 his fox in the marvellous Greatwood run of 1871. 



" Money seems the test of everything nowadays," 

 I went on. "Well, in the olden time, as you would 

 call it, they gave bigger prices for their hunters than 

 they do in this wonderful twentieth century, and, 

 excepting the extraordinary prices given for packs in 

 1909, often as much for their hounds. Forty-one years 



