MODERN CONDITIONS OF HUNTING 47 



gives the order for a large covert where he knows there 

 are foxes, and at length hounds open with the proper 

 cry. The master hurries into covert to be met by a 

 whipper-in, who tells him the fox is mangy ; he breaks, 

 however, and after twisting and turning for a mile or two, 

 is run into, and found to be a miserable, half-starved 

 specimen, and with his coat bare in places, and with 

 no fur on his brush. Arrangements are made for his 

 speedy burial, and hounds draw again, but fail to find 

 a second fox. On many other days no fox is forth- 

 coming, and at times mangy foxes are hunted, and lost 

 or killed as the case may be, while just to show that 

 the case is not altogether hopeless an occasional clean 

 fox varies the performance by giving a run. Imagine 

 also not one or two, but three or four seasons of 

 this kind of thing, and further imagine the feeling 

 of the master and his field, who know that mange 

 was never indigenous to their hunt, but that their 

 total lack of sport is neither more nor less than the 

 outcome of a selfish system of game preservation — 

 possibly more than a hundred miles away. 



Mange of a sort has probably always existed in 

 the vulpine tribe. Thirty years ago we knew of a 

 baddish case of mange in a chained fox, but this 

 yielded to treatment, a strong solution of carbolic 

 being mixed with fish oil, and the fox gradually but 

 very slowly recovered, but had a shabby coat for 

 nearly a year afterwards. But except that a very 

 old mangy fox was occasionally killed, the disease 

 was practically unknown in the hunting field, and most 

 certainly it never appeared in its recent epidemic 

 form until the early nineties. It then broke out in 

 certain southern hunts, and as far as could be ascer- 

 tained at the time it was present in different districts 



