INTRODUCTION ix 



country was no longer suitable for stag -hunting are naively 

 described in Chapter IV. Perhaps a master of more conciliatory 

 methods might have carried on for some years longer, in spite 

 of the spread of building and market gardens ; but the repeti- 

 tion of such incidents as the one described as taking place near 

 Uxbridge (p. 60) soon rendered the situation intolerable, and 

 Berkeley reluctantly resigned that part of his father's old 

 country, exchanging the hereditary orange-tawny for the scarlet 

 of the Oakley foxhounds, of which he became master. He 

 gives his own account of the disagreement which soon ensued 

 between him and the members of the hunt, but no doubt there 

 was another side to the question out of which it arose. 



One suggestion which he makes at considerable length 

 (p. 225) seems to merit as much consideration now as it did at 

 the time he was writing, namely, that the Queen's staghounds 

 should be kept as foxhounds in the New Forest. At that time 

 the New Forest deer, both red and fallow, had been doomed to 

 extinction. The sentence has been reprieved ; staghounds have 

 been kept there ever since, and there can be no question that 

 that ancient chace is a more fitting scene for the Royal pack 

 than the semi-suburban country it hunts now, with all the 

 cockney incidents and indecorous episodes incident to such a 

 locality. Moreover, the reasonable objection which many sports- 

 men and others feel to the pursuit of a carted stag would dis- 

 appear in regard to wild stags and bucks found in the forest, 

 separated from the herd by the tufters and hunted only when 

 in " pride of grease." The Queen's buckhounds would become 

 an object of popular pride, instead of one for which halting- 

 apology has to be made annually in discussing the money voted 

 for them. 



It is satisfactory to note, pace Mr. Auberon Herbert, the 

 improvement in the administration of the New Forest since the 



