NOTES 333 



experience goes of these mules, I am induced to believe that they never 

 bring forth an egg under any circumstances. In breeding these hybrids, 

 not more than one egg in two or three hundred comes to perfection, 

 otherwise they would make a beautiful variation to the bag in a day's 

 shooting. They are very much inclined to stray, and what is fatal to 

 their safety when they do so, is, that they are just as incautious and tame 

 to strangers and in strange places, as they are to those who have reared 

 them, and, consequently, easily captured and killed. I have four of 

 them, who at the present time come to feed at the drawing-room window, 

 and one of them, a beautiful pied bird, enters the room and feeds out of 

 Mrs. Berkeley's hand. 



In a conversation on game, which I had with Mr. Shaw Lefevre, he 

 told me that his keeper having found several young pheasants killed, 

 which were rearing tame at the hen-coops, he watched, and discovered an 

 old hen-pheasant in the act of killing them, and that in consequence he 

 shot her. Rather a dangerous precedent to be promulgated by way of 

 example to other keepers, for this reason. There is not an old hen- 

 pheasant sitting adjacently to the hen-coops, who, when she comes to 

 seek for food at the place where in all probability she herself was reared, 

 who will not peck on the back of the head, and kill every newly-hatched 

 young pheasant or partridge, or chicken for that matter, that gets in her 

 way. Cock-pheasants will do this as well as hens, and for that reason as 

 well as others, the little crates or boarded walls in front of the several 

 coops should be, till the young birds attain a certain size, covered with a 

 net. This keeps the full-grown pheasants out, and retains the young 

 brood to the individual hen who hatched them. If this is not done, when 

 there are many coops of variously-aged birds, they will intermix, and 

 hens knowing the strangers, the little birds who stray will get killed. 



In illustration of what I have said in regard to manner and method 

 with hounds, since my residence at Beacon the following facts came under 

 my notice. An old travelling fox found out good quarters in a small 

 patch of gorse at Highcliff. Thence he paid nightly visits to my tame 

 pets, and carried off no end of bantams, pheasants, and rabbits. ee You 

 are welcome," I said, <( but I will have some payment out of you in sport." 

 Accordingly I invited Mr. Shedden from the New Forest to hunt him. 

 We found him in the little patch of gorse, and, slipping away through the 

 plantations which join it, unseen, he ran a ring by Mudeford, and came 

 back to Highcliff, the scent being very indifferent. A long check then 

 took place in the plantations, when a farmer came up to say he had that 

 moment met the fox crossing the high-road on the other side the village. 

 The hounds were then at a check, and had Mr. Shedden lifted them to 

 where the farmer was ready to take him, the fox would have had the 

 hounds only five minutes behind him over that road. Instead of this the 



