98 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN 



create delay and give others time to peep into all the places 

 they could ; however, as there must be an end to everything, I 

 was obliged to bid the lady adieu, dismount the wall, and 

 mount my horse. Harry Boulton was with me, as good a 

 sportsman and good a fellow as need be; so, as we left the 

 place, it being towards the expiration of the time I hunted the 

 country, I told him to recollect my words, and, if my successor 

 ever ran a fox and lost him at Turvey Abbey, if Mr. Higgins, 

 or whoever might succeed Mr. Higgins, would permit it, by all 

 means to search the outhouses, and particularly the ivy on the 

 top of Mr. Higgins's bedroom, for I was certain that the foxes, 

 in contempt for the hostility of master and man, absolutely 

 slept over the heads of both, and almost tickled their noses 

 with their brushes. People laughed at this idea, and talked of 

 hidden drains, or the fox's having gone on ; but I had hounds 

 on whom I could depend, and I knew better. 



Mr. Dansey succeeded me in hunting the country, and one day 

 he ran a fox and lost him as I had done. Boulton remembered 

 what I had told him, and had, by some dealings with him, I think 

 for hay, got into Mr. Higgins's good graces. He therefore told 

 Mr. Dansey to appear to go away with the hounds, and then he 

 would ask Mr. Higgins to let him, out of mere curiosity, look 

 over the premises. Harry Boulton had an eye for the ivy, but, 

 as soon as he had got into the backyard, he saw the mark of nails 

 where animals had scrambled on to outhouses that, in the end, 

 enabled them to get on to the house. Delighted, he asked for a 

 ladder, and, when he came to where the animals ascended to the 

 roof of the mansion, he said the path was as evident as a hare's 

 run in a preserve. Up he got, crept along a well-used gutter, 

 and peeped quietly over a raised roof into the next gutter. As 

 soon as he raised himself sufficiently, close to his nose, and 

 curled up in a well -used kennel in the ivy and fast asleep, 

 lay a fox, while another fox, the one that had led the hounds 

 there, stretched himself at his ease, slightly panting, in a gutter 

 below, several other kennels in the ivy also appearing. Boulton 

 was so delighted that, with a flick of his whip and a holloa, he 



