BREEDING OF HUNTERS. 285 



turned out anything but well in their new owners' 

 hands, in comparison to what their prices warranted. 

 One of them, in fact, was sold that very night at an 

 80 sacrifice. It must have been the anxiety to have 

 a relic of Quorn which forced the prices at least thirty 

 per cent., at that eventful sale. The thermometer was 

 below freezing point ; and as we looked round at the 

 old Hall, so rich in hunting recollections of Meynell, 

 Bellingham Graham, and Osbaldeston, with its dingy 

 yellow walls, its frozen ponds, and its sad front-door 

 escutcheon, we could hardly realize that the master- 

 spirit of Leicestershire had but six short weeks be- 

 fore sallied forth from it, with his horn at his saddle- 

 bow, and his sons at his side, to open his ninth Quorn 

 season at Kirby Gate. Sir Richard was only ten 

 years old, and under the care of a clergyman at Bur- 

 ton, when his hunting days began. " The Squire," 

 who had bought Lord Monson's hounds, and was 

 then hunting his seven seasons in Lincolnshire, 

 thought he seemed to have a taste for the thing, and 

 often persuaded his tutor to let the boy-baronet leave 

 his Cornelius Nepos for a morning, and take a lesson 

 under himself and Tom Sebright, mounting him on 

 a grey pony which belonged to the latter. His fox- 

 hunting Mentor, who was a perfect horseman at 

 eighteen, had previously kept a pack of harriers on 

 the Yorkshire Wolds, and one of his first moves was 

 to challenge Sir Mark Sykes, to run a couple of them 

 four miles against a like number of his foxhounds. 

 Tom Sebright, and the late Tom Carter rode the good 

 old-fashioned drag, a small wisp of straw in which a 

 fox had lain overnight ; but the foxhounds went right 

 away from their presumptuous rivals. This little 

 mishap rather sickened him of the Holderness coun- 

 try, of whose Beverley Club, Colonel Mellish, Mr. 

 Gascoyne, Mr. Martin Hawke, and himself were the 

 members, and he sought for rather a wider field of 

 distinction. His greatest Lincolnshire day was when 



