RABBITS AND FOXES 165 



I have not seen men, with whips in their hands and caps and 

 hats on what looked like heads, commit, in my reminiscences of 

 hunting. 



Although I differed entirely from Mr. Wyndham's system of 

 hunting, I resolved, so long as I was master of Teffont and the 

 main earths in the stone quarries, he should have no lack of 

 foxes ; and I wished to get up a few rabbits to save the other 

 game. In saying this, I beg the rising generation of sportsmen 

 to remember, that having a large quantity of rabbits on a manor 

 will not save the game nor feed the foxes, unless the rabbits are 

 purposely killed, and left dead about the covers, for the foxes to 

 pick up. If this is done, you may make the old dog and vixen 

 of a litter feed as regularly as the poultry in your farm-yard, 

 and divert them from the game. The thing that will do harm 

 to the game is a single old dog-fox, who, unmarried and having 

 no children to provide for, roams the country far and wide, and 

 perhaps comes from a distance, where he has been either half- 

 entrapped or half-poisoned by a dead bait. Such a fox as this 

 will do harm, and dreading a bait will catch his own food ; and 

 a man fond of hunting must put up with it. 



My eyes being always open to signs of the time, I saw shot- 

 marks on the twigs in one or two meuses about Teffont ; there- 

 fore I need hear neither voice nor gun nor dog to be sure that 

 some one had shot at ground game, in direct disobedience of 

 orders. Over the stone quarries, where the main earths were, 

 was a sort of precipice, so steep that, for several hundred yards, 

 there was but one place where you could get down to the table- 

 land of the quarries. There were a good many rabbits about 

 that vicinity ; so I wished to kill some for the table. The first 

 day I went there, when I began to creep along the edge of the 

 cliff, I observed that Wolf, a deer-dog and retriever, and grand- 

 son of Smoker, never went with me beyond one spot, but always 

 waited there till I had either shot a rabbit or passed on to other 

 places ; and as he never went from my heels without some very 

 especial good cause, I investigated the matter, and found that he 

 always stopped at the only place by which he could descend and 



