2i8 Reminiscences of a 



spent the whole of the day (me and Claxon) trying to find 

 the line of the conduit, and dug several holes five or six 

 feet deep, but could not do any good as no one in the 

 locality knew anything about the direction the culvert ran in, 

 and it was too deep to follow up right through, so we had to 

 leave them, and heard that after the first flood both hounds 

 and fox were washed out dead into the road. We had a 

 bitch called " Promise " that happened a curious accident 

 in the east country. She was crossing the railway while a 

 coal train was passing slowly ; the wheel caught her stern 

 somehow, and cut it almost off about six or eight inches 

 from the root ; it was just hanging on by a piece of skin, 

 which I cut off, and, as she was a real good bitch, we kept 

 her a season or two, much to the delight of some of the 

 sporting fraternity, who used to come up to me and say 

 (very pleased with themselves) " I see you've got the old 

 short tailed bitch out again. Jack." Several other slight 

 accidents occurred on the railway, but perhaps the greatest 

 loss of all was when two couples of hounds, coursing their fox 

 in vew after a clinking run near Quarrington Hill, went down 

 an old disused airshaft of a pit on November 26th, 1884. 

 Heugh Hall pit shaft — at least that is what they said it was — 

 with a certain amount of water in it ; it was just simply 

 railed round, with thorn bushes and grass growing round the 

 top of it ; the fox undoubtedly went to ground in the earth 

 which we could trace at the top of the shaft, but the lead- 

 ing hounds unfortunately went down into the dark shaft, 

 whilst we had to content ourselves by listening to them 

 swimming and splashing about in the water twenty fathoms 

 or more below, unable to render any assistance, as we could 

 not see the bottom. The sound that came up was just like 

 a peal of bells ringing as the poor beasts found a momentary 



