170 Cross Country with Horse and Hound 



it is impossible to imagine a greater gulf to bridge. Theo- 

 retically it sounds most desirable; in practice it must have 

 been the hardest task ever undertaken. How disappointing 

 the results may have been all the way down the line we may 

 never know, but that the English have fought it out is to their 

 highest credit. I say " fought it out," but the battle indeed 

 is not yet finished. It is not at all infrequent, even at the 

 present day, to have a hound cast back with such marked 

 characteristics of the greyhound in one case, or of the 

 bloodhound in another, as to disqualify him as a foxhound 

 entirely; nor are such examples of atavism uniform in cer- 

 tain mothers, for puppies of the same litter often display 

 the opposite characteristics of the original progenitors. 

 One puppy is drafted for being too slow and painstaking, 

 another for being unable to follow the line, another for 

 being too free of tongue, and still another for being mute. 



Constant tendency to revert to one parent or the other 

 of course makes all cross-bred breeding most difficult. Mr. 

 Peas, in his excellent work *^ Hunting Reminiscences," 

 says it probably is within the mark to say that a Master 

 who raises sixty or eighty couples of puppies thinks himself 

 fortunate if out of the number there are ten or twenty 

 couples that come up to the standard at which he aims ; 

 and that out of this he can hope only now and again to 

 find a couple fit to win at the Peterborough Hound Show. 



Some Americans — usually, I believe, the men who have 

 tried and failed — scoff at what they call ** fancy breeding." 

 The trouble is, they have failed almost entirely to grasp 

 the nature of the problem. 



For the best stud-sires Americans have paid to English 



