206 The Hunting Field With Horse and Hound 



only the fastest greyhounds can approach. They can probably 

 run two rods to a rabbit's one. Comparing the English hare 

 to the Jack rabbit of the western plains, it is hardly too much 

 to say that the latter is as much faster than the Enghsh hare 

 as the hare is faster than the ordinary rabbit. 



Crafty and evasive as hares are in coming to their form, the 

 tricks they play on the hounds are the most interesting part of 

 the game. Brayden, in his delightful work "Hare Hunting 

 and Harriers," says "The maze they weave in foiling their hne 

 is something astonishing." 



"True sport," says the same author, "consists in the meet- 

 ing of the hounds and the game hunted on nature's own terms 

 in a free field, with no favours." A better definition of true 

 sport never was given. 



The Avriter is particularly indebted to that Sportsman 

 Poet, ]Mr. Phillpotts '^Vilhams, former Master of the Melton 

 Harriers, for several "glorious days" as well as much valuable 

 information in regard to the chase of the hare. 



All hare hunting men, as we said in the chapter on Jack 

 rabbit hunting on the plains, point with pride to ancient liistory 

 dating from three hundred and fifty to one thousand years 

 B. C, to prove the remote date, if not the beginning, of hare 

 hunting. 



Coursing men go to the same goal in the ancient records 

 for the starting point of their favourite sport. 



Hare hunting in England goes back to an early period of 

 Enghsh history — to Edward III, Queen Ehzabeth, James I, 

 and so on down to the present time. 



Fox hunting is only a modern game in England as com- 

 pared with hunting the hare. Fox hunting was not known, in 

 its present form at least, until the beginning of the eighteenth 

 century, when scarcity of deer, wolf, and wild boar, caused 

 the chase-loving Briton to turn his attention to the fox. 

 Although previously looked upon as vermin, to be killed in 



