8 Recollections of the Vine Hunt. 



some landed property of his own, could usually obtain 

 the command of sufficient country for his purpose. 



When I was a boy, there was a very old sporting 

 farmer who still came out occasionally to see a fox 

 found. I have heard him declare that, when he was 

 young, a man did not always know, when he left home, 

 with what pack he should hunt ; but that, if he got 

 up to some high ground, such as Popham Beacons 

 for instance, he would be pretty sure to hear hounds, 

 of some kind or other, running. And when he was 

 asked whether such numerous packs did not some- 

 times interfere with each other, he replied : *Well, 

 it might just come to this — that they who got first 

 found their fox or their hare, and they that came 

 afterwards had none to find.' 



The following story will show how harriers at least 

 might, in those days, clash with each other : — 



About the year 1795, a period when many foreign 

 potentates were uprooted from their native soil, and 

 transplanted for awhile into England, there was lodg- 

 ing at Dummer, in obscurity and I fear in poverty, a 

 German prince. One day he chanced to fall in with 

 some hounds in the act of kilHng a hare just outside 

 a wood ; no horseman was in sight, and the prince, 

 glad to secure such an unexpected dainty for his din- 

 ner, took away the hare, and was proceeding joyfully 

 homewards when, at a sudden turn of the road, he 

 unluckily fell in with my father with a few couples of 

 small beagles which he then kept. The prince, who 

 perhaps had not much eye for a hound, imagined that 

 he stood detected before the master of the same pack 

 that he had robbed ; so, with admirable presence of 

 mind, he made a virtue of necessity, and, presenting 



