i8o FOX-HUNTING 



Forty minutes by your watch to the second, and 

 an inspection later of the map makes it a six-mile 

 point. Your horse, with loosened girths, is being 

 led about by a boy, and you are holding the fox 

 above the baying pack, when your whip, followed 

 by three or four of the field, turns up. Don't 

 keep hounds waiting too long for their fox ; 

 tantalise them for a moment or two to increase 

 their keenness, and then throw him up. 



This is the sort of gallop that will only 

 occasionally fall to your lot, but you must be 

 sanguine enough to hope for the best every time 

 you go out, and yet content when the reality does 

 not come up to your expectations. Luck is a 

 very important factor in fox-hunting, and there 

 are many things to spoil your sport over which 

 you can have no control, but with a decent pack of 

 hounds in first-rate condition, you will not often 

 have to complain of fate. 



Keep your hounds well in blood, and if they 

 go more than three days without killing, you 

 must not go home on the fourth day until you 

 have by some means got hold of a fox. I think 

 I cannot do better than quote you here what 

 Beckford says : — * When hounds are out of blood 



