NliMROD'S NORTHERN TOUR. 289 



ing compliment paid him by, I believe, one of the Duke of Cleveland's 

 whippers-in, who had seen him oftentimes in the field, when quartered 

 with his regiment at York. " What a nation pity it is," said he, ^' that 

 that mon was born a lord ; he'd have made a capital huntsman." 



I must now return to the Banff coach — a sad falling off from the re- 

 nowned Defiance ; but, as the day was cold, and part of the ground 

 nearly as high — at least so the driver told me — as any coach runs over 

 in Scotland, I drove it merely to keep me warm, for such a set of cripples 

 as were put to it, at the first change, it is long since it has fallen to my lot 

 to manage. But I must hark back still further, and preface the meeting 

 between my noble friend and myself, by a sort of caution, something like 

 " Have a care, Nimrod ; don't overrun the scent," conveyed to me in a 

 letter I received from him a short time previously to my arrival in Scot- 

 land. It was nearly in these words. " Mind, Nimrod ! neither kennel nor 

 stable is what it was — the former only what they call in Yorkshire ' a cry 

 o' dogs.' Of myself, also, I may say, *' noii sum qualis eram" — nor have 

 I been myself since a rattler I got over a double post and rail-fence in the 

 vale of Berks. I worked on two months after I got it, and did not qui(e 

 give in until I could not stand, there being a substance inwardly and 

 outwardly as large as your fist. I went to Brodie, who probed it, but 

 said, " you must not let them either cut you for this, or heal it." Now, 

 although I was enabled last year to go through the roughest day with 

 my hounds, still the discharge has been so great lately, that I am afraid 

 my conditio?! will not be up to my work. The wound, however, sup- 

 purated three days after my last hunting-day, and since that hour, I have 

 not had a moment's pain." 



Now, I am far from being- of Cicero's opinion, that, because a man 



2 p 



