24 NIMROD'S NORTHERN TOUR. 



going to hunt during the beginning of the season in the South, and had 

 remained beyond his time at his father's for the purpose of receiving me, 

 he had no hunters at Hamsterley, so it was arranged that we should go 

 out in mufti, as the soldiers call it, on our hacks, and see as much from 

 such mounts as we could. We arrived at the place of meeting before 

 the hounds, and as we sat upon the toll-bar watching the arrivals, my 

 companion paid me the compliment of comparing my situation to that of 

 the poet Moore's at Venice, when Lord Byron and he looking from their 

 palace windows on some English passers by on the canal, the latter 

 observed how they would stare if they knew " who was looking at them !" 

 Presently the hounds and the red coats of the servants appeared in the 

 long vista formed by the turn-pike road, and I felt my heart beat quicker 

 at the inspiriting sight, after so long an estrangement ! 



Independently however of the charms that a hunting field always 

 affords me, I had another reason for wishing for a day with Sir Matthew 

 Ridley's hounds. He had lately changed his huntsman, and availed 

 himself of the services of a gentleman whom I had before heard of, as 

 one of some celebrity in the field ; namely, Mr. Boag, who had at 

 one time the management of, and hunted, the Doxford, now the Gale- 

 wood, hounds, now kept by Major St. Paul, of which I shall hereafter 

 have something to say. 



The history I believe of Mr. Boag, is this ;— He is the eldest son of 

 a man of that class in Hfe on which the highest encomiums have been 

 passed by many of the first writers of their day, and which has even 

 been selected as the one in which the greatest share of human happiness 

 was to be found. Men who, as Sir Walter Scott says of English 

 Yeomen — the class to which I allude — are 



