HARE-HumiMG — Its Varieties. 403 



sportsmen will certainly be found, not unfrequently veterans who have been hard riders to 

 fox and stag in "their hot youth." 



Now the arts of the sportsman are as well worth acquiring as those of the horseman. 

 Hare-hunting is not only an excellent apprenticeship for the young fo.x-hunter, but a safe 

 recreation for those who have taken to horsemanship late in life, because they can take 

 just as much of it as suits their constitution, and leave off when they please. 



The hare, unlike the fox, runs in circles. You have therefore your choice either to 

 follow the hounds, or to ride the segment of a circle, saving the devious turns ; or, indeed, 

 you may stand still and, if the country is open and undulating, watch the chase while 

 waiting for the return of the hare and the pack. 



Amongst my earliest hunting recollections is one of an old Somersetshire baronet, who 

 used to take his post on a fat cob in the middle of a hundred acres of grass almost 

 surrounded by coverts, and spend the morning in listening to and watching a pack of 

 queerly-bred beagles chasing hares out of and into the coverts. On rainy days the groom 

 who stood at the cob's head completed the picture by holding a huge gig-umbrella over 

 Sir Edward's head. 



This was in a part of the county never visited by fox-hounds ; and when one day the 

 pack got upon an outlying fox and raced him, followed only by one very young whip and 

 a stranger youth, for thirty minutes, great was the sensation ; nothing but very humble 

 flattery on the youth's part saved the whip's place. 



Down hares are stouter than the hares found in arable districts, and frequently run 

 nearly as straight as a fox. In Ireland it is said that the hares in the grass-feeding, 

 stone-wall-divided districts afford quite as good sport as foxes in our second-class counties. 



Peter Beckford had, he relates in his " Thoughts on Hunting," a very perfect pack of 

 hare-hounds, in what he describes as " a very bad county for the purpose," that is, closely 

 enclosed and too plentifully provided with coverts and hares. He sums up the advantages 

 of the sport in a very few words : " Hare-hunting is a good diversion in a good country. 

 You are always certain of sport, and if yon really love to see (and hear) your hounds hunt, 

 the hare when properly hunted zvill s/unv you more of it than any other animal." " It should 

 be taken as a ride after breakfast, to get an appetite for dinner. If you make a business 

 of it you spoil it." 



The packs of hare-hounds enumerated in the summary of the tables of the " Rural 

 Almanack " differ more in breed, size, and quality than any of the established packs of fox- 

 hounds. They are variously described as harriers, fox-hounds, beagles, and cross-breeds of 

 those three breeds — a very favourite cross being between the harrier and the fox-beagle, 

 which was the blood of which Beckford's pack was composed. Many packs consisted of 

 purely-bred dwarf fox-hounds. They varied in height from beagles of fifteen inches to pure 

 harriers and pure fox-hounds of twenty-two inches ; the intermediate size of nineteen inches 

 for cross-bred harriers appearing to be most popular. The number of couples varied from 

 ten to twenty, fifteen being about a fair average. A dozen packs of beagles not exceeding 

 fifteen inches in height were generally hunted on foot. 



The countries hunted over by hare-hounds differ as much as the packs. Thus the Earl of 

 Pembroke's, which hunt the country round Salisbury, including Salisbury Plain, and which 

 acquired their reputation during a quarter of a century under the mastership of Mr. Walter 

 Flower, were pure harriers ; an equally celebrated pack, the Brookside, hunting Rottingdean, on 

 the Brighton Downs, were from a cross of fox-hound and harrier. Sir Robert Harvey's, hunting 



