112 COURSING THE HARE 



since 1857 the records of public coursing have been 

 fairly well kept, though it is a fact that many of the 

 smaller and less important meetings never fmd their 

 way into the Calendar at all — a fact which can be 

 easily understood when it is stated that the National 

 Coursing Club do not require a return from each 

 secretary of a meeting, after the manner of the Jockey 

 Club and National Hunt Committee, which insist 

 that every clerk of the course shall comply with 

 their regulations in this respect. At the same time, 

 it is only fair to state that the secretaries of all small 

 coursing meetings are unpaid officials, while the 

 Jockey Club officials are all licensed and paid for 

 their services. The history of coursing has been 

 presented in Goodlake, Thacker, in the Stud Book, 

 and in the Coursing volume of the Badminton 

 Library ; and seeing that the last-mentioned work is 

 of so recent a date, I shall not attempt to carry my 

 readers over the well-worn ground, but shall divide 

 my limited space between the two conditions under 

 which the sport has long been pursued in this country. 

 Of these two, the simpler is coursing at home, 

 for the pure love of the sport, where no mone- 

 tary considerations can come into play. The other 

 is the running of greyhounds in public, a form of 

 sport which involves the preparation of the animals 



