DUKE OF RUTLAND 151 



great bore ; * and so they certainly are to your very bard riding 

 men, for they cannot always get from under their horses' feet. Mr. 

 Maher, upon Potash, would always ensure sport ; and only let him 

 get clear away from the crowd, it must be a very good one that can 

 catch him. 



On the 26th met the Duke of Eutland's hounds at Stubton, the 

 seat of Sir George Hearn, to the right of the road between Grantham 

 and Newark. I found them — as I expected to find them — very 

 clean in their skins ; but I was more particularly struck with the 

 fine length of their frames, and the strongly marked and uniform 

 character of the pack. All this, however, is to be accounted for. 

 For one mile that these hounds travel, Mr. Osbaldeston's travel six , 

 and the Duke generally breeds from thirty to forty couples of 

 whelps every year ; so that if twenty couples of them stand, he can 

 always pick and choose. 



We found a vixen fox heavy at Stubton, which luckily got to 

 ground in good time ; and found again in about an hour afterwards 

 in a beautiful gorse covert by the side of a hanging hill. The fox 

 went away quickly over a very fine vale for about two miles, w^hen a 

 fallow field stopped us. He then turned again for the hill, and we 

 did nothing worth speaking of afterw^ards. 



I was told the day before by a hard-riding Meltonian, that I must 

 screw up my nerves if I went into the Stubton country ; and I 

 think I never did see one so strongly fenced. If I could have made 

 use of the pencil, I would have brought away a sketch of one of 

 them. It was a blackthorn hedge about eight inches higher than 

 the top of my hat as I stood on the ground, with growers in it as 

 thick as a man's thigh, plashed at the top, and with a wide ditch on 

 one side. On remarking to Mr. Eobert Grosvenor that it was a 

 stiff country, he observed that it w^as so to be sure: " but," added 

 he, " a man has nothing to do but to throw his heart over and follow 

 it." This is all very well, thought I, but it is not every heart that 

 will leap so high even when its owner gives the word: " a man 

 cannot add a cubit to his stature." 



* It is a well-kuown fact, that a season or two back two very hard-riding 

 Meltonians, at the end of a very sharp burst, went half a mile neck and neck 

 over the country beyond where the hounds had killed their fox. 



