18 THE GREYHOUND. 



Although what I am going to say will be as stale and 

 tiresome to and as likely to create a smile in many as 

 listening to a child's first lesson in the alphabet, I 

 consider it, for the reasons already given, necessary. 

 Two dogs only are slipped at a hare and this has always 

 been the honourable practice in this country. Even the 

 Greek courser Arrian recognises this, saying : " Whoever 

 courses with Greyhounds should neither slip them near 

 the hare, nor more than a brace at a time " ; and in 

 Turberville's "Observations on Coursing" we find the 

 maxim : " If the Greyhounds be but yonge or slow you 

 may course with a lease at one hare, but that is seldom 

 seen, and a brase of dogges is ynow for such a poore 

 beaste." 



The hare being found or so-ho'd, and given law a 

 fair start of, at one time, more than a hundred yards, 

 but now reduced the dogs are slipped. In the run 

 up, as in after stretches following a turn, the relative 

 speed of the dogs is seen; but the hare, being pressed, 

 will jerk, turn, and wind in the most nimble manner, 

 testing the dogs' smartness in working, suppleness, 

 and agility in making quick turns, and "it is a gallant 

 sport to see how the hare will turn and wind to save 

 herself out of the dogge's mouth, so that, sometimes^ 

 when you think that your Greyhound doth, as it were, 

 gape to take her, she will turn and cast them a good 

 way behinde her, and so save herself by turning, wrench- 

 ing, and winding." It is by the practice of these 

 clever wiles and shifts that the hare endeavours to reach 

 her covert, and in closely following her scut, and o'er- 

 mastering her in her own devices, that a Greyhound 



