320 The Post and the Paddock. 



boiler into a red coat, and the pair found a fox with 

 the second pack, and killed him at Bryn-y-pys, after a 

 regular crow-flight of twenty-five miles. Luckily the 

 puppies were out at walk when the madness oc- 

 curred in the kennel in 1842; and as twenty-five 

 couple were entered the next season, the original 

 blood was kept right. For many weeks, watchers 

 with long leathern gauntlets and badger tongs held 

 their dull sentry, night after night, to drag out each 

 hound to his doom the moment he showed any symp- 

 toms. Each of them was then chained in a separate 

 kennel ; but the subtle poison crept on and on, and at 

 last sixty couple of working hounds, as clever and 

 bony as any in England, had to be destroyed. The 

 shooting days of a noble racing Earl among his, 

 thorough-breds, was nothing to the final slaughter ; 

 and the poor victims were replaced by fifty couple of 

 Mr. Codrington's hounds. 



But this gradual digression from the bays and the 

 chestnuts into the world of the blue-pies and the red- 

 tans, gives warning that our horse-notes are exhausted 

 for the present. Be this as it may, it was with some 

 distant notion of a chapter on hunting that we were 

 lingering lately near a meet, when a pert young 

 townsman, evidently " out for the day," rode up, and 

 determined at all hazards to make some remark to the 

 huntsman. 



"You'll not 'ave got all your dogs out, I fancy, 

 sir ?" he began. 



" No," was the curt reply of the latter, as he eyed 

 his man ; " thirty couple more at home." 



" Thirty couple more !" was the rejoinder. " If you 

 'ad them all out, what an 'owling they'd make !" 



The grim disgust of the old huntsman, and the 

 satisfied smirk of the distinguished commentator, 

 formed a never-to-be-forgotten tableau. There they 

 sat eyeing each other, the breathing types of the 

 Tom Moody and the " little Tom Noddy" schools ; 



