m HUNTING AND SPORTING NOTES, 



days, and the captain won the first steeplechase I ever 

 saw run, while a boy at Eton. 



A curious circumstance has come to light in the 

 neighbourhood of Onslow and the Cross Gates, which 

 throws much light on our recant disappointments. It 

 will give comfort to more than one landowner, on whom 

 Borderer has, he admits, been rather hard. This week a 

 pipe drain near Gough's coppice being stopped up, 

 labourers were set to work to open it. Two hundred and 

 sixty yards from its entrance and seventy yards from its 

 upper outlet, they came upon the carcase of a fox ; still there 

 was an obstruction, when another was unearthed, then 

 another, and still anothei'. Three dogs and a vixen! It 

 appears that this drain had been dry all the summer and 

 autumn, and that the heavy rains had flushed it. The 

 foxes were all lying with their heads uphill, and the drain 

 was too narrow for them to turn round. The first had 

 created a dam, and been drowned, and the others being 

 unable to get past him, had gradually shared his miserable 

 fate. They had been dead about a month. No wonder 

 therefore that foxes have unaccountably disappeared from 

 this side of the country. It reminds me of what occurred 

 a few years ago in the Qaorn Country, when nine foxes 

 were similarly dug out of a drain during a wet time. 

 Moral — " Put gratings on your drains." 



SEVENTEENTH WEEK— February 16 to 21. 



There are times when it seem;^ difficult to get up the 

 steam. How can I write about horses and hounds when 

 ever and anon the spectre of those arid plains in equatorial 

 Africa, where a mere handful of indomitable spirits are 

 standing back to back, facing fanatical hordes, keeps 

 uppermost in my thoughts, and the blood of some of our 

 best and bravest has lately weltered well nigh uselessly 

 on its deserts, and at Khartoum? When, too, the scions 

 of many a Shropshire home, and especially of two of 

 our noblest and best sporting families, are just starting 

 to aid ir stemming the coming storm of Infidelism — 

 going, forsooth, to meet a worse enemy than this — the 

 deadly climate of a burning African summer. 



" Come, Borderer," says a cheery bit of fair humanity 

 -at my elbow, "don't begin prosing and dirgmg any 



