ii6 RADNOR REMINISCENCES 



It was quite a nice fifty-eight minutes, and thoroughly 

 enjoyed by all the officers, as it was their first and proba- 

 bly only run of the season. 



Mr. Edward Ilsley, who was following in a motor, was 

 waiting along the Wyola Road opposite Serrill's track, 

 watching hounds. As they came over the hill from Yar- 

 nall's Hollow, he saw the hunted fox trying to put hounds 

 off the line by running along the top rail of a post-and- 

 rail fence. One often hears of a fox doing a trick like this, 

 but it's very seldom that one sees it. At any rate, it 

 was n't successful this time, for hounds carried the line 

 straight alongside this fence and on through the wood. 



How much of the sagacity of the fox is real and how 

 much is the supposed repetition of fabulous feats and their 

 parallels, one never quite knows; and, as Mr. Dale says in 

 the Sporting and Dramatic News^ I have recently seen 

 records of the doings of foxes that are supposed to have 

 been done by design to save their lives and to be due to 

 reasoning powers. Thus a fox is seen to run along the top 

 of a wall and he chances to escape. Consequently, he is 

 supposed to have "run the wall" in order to escape; that 

 is, in order to put hounds off the scent. It has never struck 

 me as a feat performed for any such object, except to this 

 extent, that any turn is likely to put hounds off, not more 

 so if it is a turn at right angles, as along a fence after an 

 approach to it over the open of a field, or whether that 

 right-angle turn is in the middle of a field or on the fence. 

 Foxhounds are bred for drive, and consequently any 

 right-angle turn is as likely, and no more likely, to make 

 them overrun the line than a sudden hide in a furrow 

 would be. But there may not be a furrow to hide in. There 

 may be a wall, and, if hounds approach the latter and smell 

 fox scent on top of it, they naturally believe it comes from 



