REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN. 127 



trumpet to the tail hounds : the effect of this was to 

 stop all intermediate hounds, and make them pause 

 as to which way the head lay. There should be but 

 one horn heard at the same time, and master and 

 man should have particular notes understood by each 

 other wlien the voice was beyond hearing. For in- 

 stance, in Yardley Chase a single note on the liorn 

 from George Carter or Tom Skinner, told me the 

 hounds were over a ride and into a fresh quarter, 

 and the same from me to them. If either of us 

 doubled the notes it conveyed to the others that the 

 hounds were away from one particular wood into 

 another, and if continuously doubled then gone away 

 over the open. By a huntsman the horn should 

 never be used unless imperatively necessary ; if used 

 too much the hounds will become careless of the call. 

 I know a country in which the master of the hounds 

 uses his horn for ever in drawing, and this horn 

 draws every cover in the vale within hearing. The 

 foxes there know the trumpet as well as a cock 

 pheasant knows the whistle of a shooter to his dog in 

 the last month of the season, and there is not a 

 gamekeeper tliere who does not know that when 

 this horn is heard in his covers, however far off, 

 away go the foxes he has the care of. A fox has, 

 as I have said before, a large amount of reasoning 

 faculty in his beautiful head, the very expression 

 of his eye tells it, and it is further proved by the 

 impossibility of tlie stufFer or preserver of beasts 

 and birds to give the specimen its crafty and ob- 

 servant expression ; it is also beyond the art of the 

 painter. 



While hunting Bedfordshire a curious circumstance 

 happened to me in regard to a little boy, the son of a 



