CHAPTER XIII 



Life at Coxwold Vicarage Terriers and Game-cocks Criticism 

 of other Terriers near Rugby Training for the Sports 

 Beaten for the Half-mile The Exhibitions and the Assistant 

 Masters Kingcraft and Champagne Bottles High-pressure 

 Reading for the Exhibitions Merely to annoy the Junior 

 Masters Radicals and Free-thinkers Troubles of Stevenson 

 Our Farewell Banquet An Exhibition won Invited to 

 give it up Thoughts after leaving Rugby 



SOME time before my later days at Rugby my 

 sister and I had left Kilvington and gone to live 

 at Coxwold Vicarage, where we spent several very 

 happy years. We had our horses, and I was allowed to 

 build kennels there. Moreover, I secured ideal shooting 

 at Oldstead, extending up the Hambleton hills as far as 

 the Hambleton Hotel, where sometimes Tom Green would 

 be found, and sometimes James Dawson, brother of the 

 more famous Mathew, Tom, Joseph and John Dawson. 

 James Dawson was a very capable trainer, but he had 

 the misfortune to find an employer who was financially 

 unsound, and so he never made much headway. How 

 the good old parson at Coxwold ever endured the habits 

 of that time has long been a mystery ; for fox-terriers 

 had always to be thoroughly tested, and among other 

 means to this end a freshly caught badger was established 

 under the charge of an old woodcutter in one of the 

 outhouses of Shandy Hall, not two hundred yards from the 

 vicarage. Life was decidedly more barbaric then than now. 

 Tom Scott and I kept game-cocks there and did many 

 other things which might seem reprehensible, but the world 

 went very well with us, and so came along the early half 

 of 1870, when my erratic sojourn at Rugby was drawing 

 to its close. 



138 



