NIMROUS NORTHERN TOUR. 251 



sportsmen, and one of them strongly corroborative of an asser- 

 tion once made by me, in print, namely, that luck has not more 

 to do with the game of hazard than with fox-hunting. Our first 

 draw was a very pretty woodland cover of about ten acres, a 

 little to the right of the Aberdeen and Edinburgh road, and 

 always, I understood, a sure find. It proved so to-day, for in 

 ten minutes after the hounds were thrown into it, I among 

 others viewed the fox away. As soon as he had got two fields 

 clear of the cover, we gave Mr. Dalyell the office, and away he 

 came with the pack at his heels (taking a gate on the road, by- 

 the-by, with his horn in his mouth, and followed by Skinner), 

 but they were as silent as if asleep, when they got on the head- 

 land which he had run along. " What can this be ?" inquired 

 their huntsman ; " who saw the fox ?" " We all saw him," said 

 the laird of Brigton. Dalyell tried on, ay, on the very line to 

 an inch, and not a hound spoke. Tried the field beyond ; still 

 no scent, and no crowd near them. " What can this be ?" said 

 Dalyell, jumping into a large fallow field, and trying across it ; 

 when, as though all their heads were tied together, they turned 

 short to the left, took up the scent in a furrow, and ran as hard 

 up to a cover on a hill, about two miles distant, as they ever ran 

 in their lives in short, with a breast-high scent ! 



Now for my comment on this event. Had no one seen this 

 fox, it is evident he would not have been hunted a yard beyond 

 the cover, because the hounds had a fair chance given them to 

 do so, over two fields, and those favourable ones for scent ; the 

 game was not two minutes ahead, neither were the hounds 

 hurried nor blown when laid on. The huntsman would naturally 

 have turned back in despair. But the fact was, as I shall pre- 

 sently show, there was not an atom of scent that day, down wind, 

 although the best mounted man, or hardest rider in Scotland, 

 would not deserve a better than these hounds had when they took 

 the scent in the furrow, up wind; and had it not been for the 

 cover, at the end of two miles, no fox could have stood their pace 

 many minutes longer. 



Now then for the proof of this assertion, respecting one 

 among the many phenomena of scent. It happened that I 

 again viewed the fox away from the cover into which we had 

 run him, and again gave Mr. Dalyell the office. To make the 

 matter still more clear, the fox had gone down a large grass 

 field, close under the wall ; nevertheless, although the pack 

 actually trod in his very pad-steps, not a hound spoke until they 

 had got to the bottom of the enclosure, when they hunted him 

 slowly, in a small patch of gorse, but were never able to get up 

 to him, as he continued going down wind. If ever I venture 



