22 THE MEYNELL HOUNDS. 



with wire ! and when he hunted from Teddesley on the 

 south to Shipley on the north. In some ways, no doubt, 

 it was better. Foxes were wilder, probably, for one thing, 

 but against that must be set the fact that the greater 

 part of Staffordshire was under the plough. Charles 

 Leedham was fond of telling how Mr. Michael Bass said 

 to Mr. Meynell, as all three were jogging along together 

 one day, " We may not, but Charles will live to see all 

 this plough laid down to grass." The fences, too, in 

 Derbyshire were, many of them, great, rough, untrimmed, 

 bull-finches, the remnants of which may be seen standing 

 in the fields to this day, no longer as fences, but for shade 

 and shelter. Through a kind of magnified smeuse in 

 these, Mr. John FitzHerbert used to tell us that their 

 ponies would creep, and pound horses, which could neither 

 jump over nor crawl through. Not but what such men 

 as the Squire of Radburne of that day, his brother the 

 Rev. Reginald Chandos-Pole, planter of Parson's gorse, the 

 Rev. G. Buckston of Sutton, and his brother of the 

 cloth, the Rev. F. W. Spilsbury of Willington — known 

 respectively as the creeping and the flying parson — or Sir 

 Matthew Blakiston, could and did go where the hounds 

 went. If the country has a fault, it is that it is small — 

 small in extent, and small as to its enclosures — and it 

 may be an advantage or the contrary, according to how 

 you look at it, that the fences, nowadays, are not large, 

 though what they lack in size they make up in multitude. 

 It is, as some one said, a case of all jumps and no fields. 

 You are always in the air, and, if a man does not like 

 jumping, he had better not come to Derbyshire. In 

 Staffordshire the enclosures are larger, and the number of 

 people out much smaller, so there is a sensation of having 

 much more room. "A handy horse that can jump water 

 is required." No truer sentence ever was penned. To 

 enjoy yourself with the Meynell hounds you must have 

 a horse which you can twist, turn, and stop, and ask to 

 jump at the shortest notice, and, in Derbyshire especially, 

 he must be willing to face water. The brooks are not 



