TRADITION. 25 



the world was not enlivened with the sound of hound and 

 horn till about the year 1878, when Mr. P. H. Cooper and 

 Mr. Rolleston were Masters of the South Notts. They had 

 a bye-day one Saturday in Horsley Car, and found a fox, 

 which they ran over Breadsall Moor and lost at Smalley. 

 After that, owing to Mr. Sitwell, of Stainsby, and the 

 exertions of the Masters of the South Notts, ably backed 

 by the Messrs. Feilden, of Horsley, the coverts were re- 

 stocked with foxes, and the country has been regularly 

 hunted ever since. Will those who once saw him ever 

 forget Mr. Robert Feilden's famous horse, the Robber? 

 He was a great, plain, bay horse, with a fiail-like tail, 

 which he carried very high, and was a rare fencer and an 

 astonishingly stout horse, as may be gathered from the 

 fact that he always did two days a week except when he 

 did three. Mr. Feilden had an instinctive notion of the 

 run of a fox, besides knowing every gate and gap. It was 

 amusing to see him followed by a gang of timid riders, 

 and to note their dismay, when, at length, the old horse 

 lobbed over the inevitable boundary fence, and left them 

 pounded and flabbergasted, as in Leech's famous picture 

 of the squire's second horseman. 



But this refers to comparatively modern times, in the 

 seventies, and it is necessary to put the clock back some 

 fifty years, to the time when Mr. Hugo Charles Meynell, 

 in 1816, with twenty-eight and a half couples of hounds, 

 kenneled at Hoar Cross, took the field with Thomas Leed- 

 ham the first as huntsman, and his son Joe as whipper- 

 in, and, apparently, but a short stud to carry them. 

 Tradition has it that Mr. Meynell started with a pack of 

 foot-beagles, and that Tom Leedham, being then in the 

 stables, became his right-hand man in everything connected 

 with the hounds. Later on the beagles developed into 

 harriers, their followers were mounted, and Leedham, 

 having been advanced to coachman, now added to that the 

 role of huntsman, and so by degrees was evolved the Hoar 

 Cross Hunt of 1816. The squire, though a great hounds- 

 man, was not addicted to hard riding ; but it must have 



