NIMROHS NORTHERN TO UR. 28 1 



be called in the south one short one, because his seasons are 

 short, owing to the backwardness of the harvest in that part of 

 Scotland, which prevents his beginning hunting until the kennel 

 doors of his brother sportsmen in England exhibit a fair share 

 of noses. The average of stoppage from frost also is at least 

 six weeks. Still, in the season in which I visited him, he killed 

 twenty brace of foxes up to the 5th of April, which must be con- 

 sidered a fair share of sport, making allowance for circum- 

 stances, by which the character and performance of all hounds 

 and their huntsmen should be judged. 



Previously to Lord Kelburne, Sir David Baird hunted these 

 countries ; and after him Mr. Oswald of Shieldhall, to whom it 

 will be recollected I sent a huntsman named Butler, commonly 

 called Shock when in the service of the late Earl of Derby, who 

 gave much satisfaction the first year, but I never heard of him 

 afterwards. The hounds had then three kennels one at the 

 mouth of the river Doare, in Ayrshire, where they remained in 

 the non-hunting months ; one at Cathcart, three miles south of 

 Glasgow ; and another, given to them by Sir John Maxwell, of 

 Pollock, ten miles distant from Glasgow to the eastward. 



I will now give my opinion of Lord Kelburne's hounds in a 

 few words, and it shall be an honest one. I thought them, to 

 the eye, equal to, if not superior to, any other in Scotland. And 

 why should they not be so ? They are the blood of two of the 

 most celebrated kennels in England the Lambton and the 

 Beaufort, chiefly the former ; but of their steadiness I cannot 

 say so much. I found from his lordship the theory is beautiful, 

 but the practice, unfortunately, is inadmissible ; the attempt, 

 however, is most creditable that he had all but abolished the 

 use of the lash for the two previous seasons, by which means his 

 pack had got ahead of him, as all fox-hounds will do, and the 

 higher they are bred the more so. He had, however, altered his 

 system, and, from letters I received from him the following 

 season for the friendship Lord Kelburne honoured me with by 

 no means ceased with my visit to him I found he had got a 

 new and active whipper-in ; in addition to a capital draft of en- 

 tered as well as unentered hounds, from the Duke of Cleveland, 

 when his Grace reduced his kennel to thirty-two couples of old 

 and ten of young hounds ; that his pack was very much im- 

 proved in their work, all of which was confirmed to me in a 

 letter from a friend who had been hunting with them during the 

 Caledonian meeting, held for that season in Ayrshire, and who 

 thus expressed himself respecting them : " I saw two beautiful 

 things with Lord Kelburne during the race week. The first, 

 twenty-five minutes, super excellent the second, an hour, over 



