CHANGES IN FOX-HUNTING 353 



hunted a certain amount on both sides of St. George's 

 Channel. 



"The world went very well then," I thought, but 

 I can well remember that the old brigade said hunting 

 was " dying out and couldn't go on." Perhaps the 

 ladies revived it ! Perhaps the old 'uns were mis- 

 taken, and meant that they were dying out ! Wire, 

 though, had begun to creep in. It was in 1868, I 

 think (but certainly not later) that I saw the late 

 Mr. Henry Briscoe, M.F.H., get a terrible fall over 

 wire near Fiddown Station, Co. Kilkenny, from the 

 effects of which he told me he never quite recovered. 

 The wire on this occasion was run through some 

 bushes in a gap on the roadside, and Mr. Briscoe 

 wanted to get into the field to cast his hounds. The 

 horse tried to brush through, and turned slowly over, 

 crushing his rider, who, however, was able to ride 

 home. Leech, in one of his hunting sketches in Punch, 

 shows a bad accident from wire, where a sportsman 

 is down and badly hurt apparently, and one of the 

 Hunt servants is falling heavily close by. Now John 

 Leech died in the year 1864. Still, wire was very 

 rarely seen in Ireland till several years later. I 

 was quite appalled when I returned to the country 

 in 1877, after four years' absence, to see the progress 

 it had made even then. It is many years since 

 Whyte-Melville wrote in Bailys Magazine his verses, 

 "Ware Wire," a protest to the farmers. His lines 

 doubtless called attention to the evil, but could not, 

 of course, be expected to check it or induce those he 

 addressed to " Up with the timber and down with the 

 wire." Money, which maketh the mare to go, even 

 over a country that has been wired, can alone do that. 



Hounds, Gentlemen, Please. 24 



