344 GUN, RIFLE, AND HOUND. 



unfitting that race to be the beasts of chase nature had 

 made them. 



Contrast the cub of the mountain with that of the 

 pheasant-covert. From the first the former is used to 

 see the game or poultry he eats brought home by his 

 dam. As soon as his strength is equal to it he has to 

 go and learn how to seek it himself. Before autumn 

 comes he knows the country far around his native earth, 

 and, when the cubbing season has shown him that the 

 note of the foxhound means, " Run or die," he com- 

 bines every requisite to enable him to give a fine run 

 later on strength, health, courage, and knowledge of 

 the country. 



Very different is the case with the other. When 

 only a few weeks old he hears the shot that rolls his 

 dam over dead close to her earth. He is then dug out 

 and conveyed in a sack to an outhouse which will be 

 his home for months, and there, fed on unwholesome 

 offal, he loses health and courage. In August he is 

 i-aken back to the woods, but as he has no idea of the 

 methods of gaining his food he might starve but for the 

 plentiful supply of specially-shot rabbits he finds lying 

 about. When the hounds come cubbing he is routed 

 out of the wood. In his new quarters, however, there 

 are no dead rabbits, and his inborn instinct takes him 

 home again before the next day breaks. So it goes 

 on till one day he is killed, his epitaph being " Ringing 

 brute ! " How could it be otherwise, as he has never 

 yet been a mile from his birthplace ? 



Yet the very people who say, " Good fellow, 

 Jones ; don't hunt himself, but always has a fox in his 



