178 THE COMPLETE FOXHUNTER 



plentiful as blackberries in autumn. The field live, for 

 the most part, about Leatherhead, Dorking, Epsom, and 

 Guildford, but of course some of them reside further 

 south ; all are enthusiastic, and the establishment is 

 conducted on the most orthodox principles. 



For many years we have marvelled over the word- 

 pictures which Surtees drew of the Old Surrey hounds, 

 and have never been able to realise how much of his 

 descriptions was true and how much chaff. For our 

 own part we saw the pack in question as long ago 

 as during the mastership of Messrs. Mortimer and 

 Nicholl, and the Surrey Union, when Mr. Francis Scott 

 or Mr. J. Barnard Hankey were in office. We never 

 had more than an odd day at that time with either pack, 

 and indeed we rode from London to more than one 

 Surrey Union fixture. We had, however, previously 

 seen all the Shire packs in the field, many of those 

 which hunt in the Western Midlands, and several of 

 the most important northern packs. We had there- 

 fore some experience and some knowledge of how 

 things should be done, and having always been great 

 readers of Surtees' works we had come to believe that 

 we should see something comic in the Old Surrey 

 Hunt, in spite of the fact that Surtees had written his 

 accounts of hunting in Surrey some thirty years before. 

 But we had not been five minutes at a meet before we 

 discovered that if the accounts which Surtees gave had 

 been true thirty years before, they could not be recon- 

 ciled for a moment now. The turn-out of the establish- 

 ment was just like that of any other hunt. The men 

 were better dressed and better mounted than we had 

 seen the servants of much more important hunts ; the 

 packs were good-looking and level, and the hunting 

 was conducted on correct enough lines. 



