TROUBLOUS TIMES. 301 



of the best servants the hunt has ever liad. Jem 

 Blackmore, who Hved at Haddon and in whom the 

 knowledge of his art was practically hereditary, was 

 harbourer till his death in 1861 ; Jack Babbage, an 

 Anstey man, who had hunted hare and also stag for 

 one season, 1848, under Sir Arthur Chichester, was 

 huntsman till 1868, when he retired through old age; 

 and Arthur Heal, a native of Washfield, near 

 Tiverton, who had begun life as a " buttons " in the 

 service of Mr. Baillie Collyns, and had subsequently 

 been entered to harehunting, was whipper-in ; an 

 able trio of whom the latter proved himself, after he 

 succeeded Babbage in 1868, to be the ablest. He 

 is — for though close on ninety he is still strong 

 enough to ride to the nearest meets — one of those 

 men in whom the hunting instinct is born, and he 

 would probably have shown himself as great an 

 adept at killing rats or big game as he was at killing 

 deer. He was admittedly a very fine shot, and had 

 a skilful hand on a ily-rod. 



The hunt sustained a severe loss in i868 by the 

 death of Mr. Nicholas Snow, of Oare, in his eightieth 

 year. To his zealous care of the deer, and in 

 pajrticular to his action in enclosing the best bit of 

 heather on the moor (now known as the Deer Park) 

 with a fence which let deer readily in and out, but 

 excluded sheep and ponies, and in planting the little 

 'combes adjoining with larch, is largely to be attri- 

 buted the preservation of the deer on that side from 

 destruction in the troublous times, and the increase 



