AULD LANG SYNE. 341 



am in a wood. Every fox I find I mean to kill, and 

 these hounds are the sort that will have him. An 

 open country and a woodland pack are different 

 things. What you call a good pack will never catch 

 a bad fox, and as I want to hunt him instead of his 

 hunting me, I think my hounds best calculated for 

 my country " In the afternoon, when the fly was 

 off them, no hounds would hunt better ; but, as we 

 all know, in the afternoon the bloom is off then men, 

 horses, and hounds have had their first sweat, and the 

 only one of the party who is fresh is the fox. You 

 may hunt him till dark, but if he be good for aught 

 you will never grab him. After the old Duke's death, 

 the late Lord Southampton took them, and Tom 

 Rose continued to hunt them. They were kept much 

 in the same form, and with the same result : in 

 short, he killed his foxes in the woodlands, and they 

 beat him in the open. 



His lordship's great delight was to breed them 

 stout, and if ever a hound tired he never took him 

 out again. He had a hound called Dragon, the 

 wildest and the stoutest hound that ever hunted. 

 When he was running for his fox at the end of a long 

 day, you might see him with his head up, waving his 

 stern, and throwing himself into a wood as fresh as 

 if he had just come out. After Lord Southampton's 

 death, the late Duke took them, and old Tom hunted 

 them till he was obliged to give it up. His son hunted 

 them for a short time, and then they fell into the 

 hands of George Carter* George tried, and succeeded 

 in a great degree, in making them an open country 

 pack : he got out of the woods whenever he could, 

 drafted the skylarkers, and, though he never got 

 them steady, he killed his foxes. He could not kill 

 a bad fox, like Tom Rose with his wild-boys, but he 

 was the first man in that country who could ever 

 catch a good one over the open. 



In our passing records of the chase we must not 



