ON DiSTEMrER AND MADNESS AMONG HOUNDS. 117 



througli the kennel window — for I suppose the 

 people were afraid to enter — for the purpose of 

 destroying in one way or other the handsome, 

 generous creatures, who directed their bright, 

 affectionate, unsusj)ecting eyes to the hand that 

 was at the moment planning their thankless and 

 miserable destruction. I can imagine the horrors 

 of it, but, thank Heaven! I was not there to 

 see it; nor can I call to mind anything in my 

 sporting career that has ever equalled it in 

 ignorance, misai^prehension, or cruelty. 



"Wlien I kept staghounds at Cranford, my kennel 

 there (it was my father's old foxhound kennel when 

 he hunted a country from Kensington Gardens, by 

 Cranford and Gerrand's Cross, to Nettlebed, and 

 the Cotswolds down to Berkeley Castle and its 

 vale of the Severn) was once visited by a disease 

 which carried off quite half my pack. The hounds 

 never seemed to be ill in the day, there was nothing 

 to forewarn of aj^proaching illness and death, l)ut 

 they all died in the night time, and were found 

 placidly curled up on their straw on their bedstead 

 in the morning, as if life had left them without 

 a struggle. 



So extraordinary was their manner of death, that 



