30 HARE-HUNTING AND HARRIERS 



exact was the discipline by which these Hounds were 

 regulated, that in the hottest scent, if the hunting 

 Pole were thrown before them, they stopped in an 

 instant, and followed the Huntsman's heels in full 

 cry, till he again permitted their going forward ; this 

 much lengthened the Chase, which sometimes lasted 

 five or six hours." A strange method, truly ! 



Having presented portraits of hare - hunters from 

 the reign of Charles I. to the middle of the eighteenth 

 century, let me complete my gallery of old-time 

 sportsmen by depicting an Essex squire named Saich, 

 who flourished about the year 1800. " He was," 

 says a writer in the Sporting Magazine for July 1827, 

 " an old gentleman residing at Layer, in the country 

 between Colchester and the Sea, on the Maldon side, 

 who possessed and cultivated a considerable quantity 

 of land and was much respected. He kept a pack of 

 hounds, was a Nimrod by nature, and had a jovial soul, 

 indulging in the spontaneous impulses of each without 

 niggardly restraint. It was not the fashion in those 

 days to organise your establishment in much refine- 

 ment. . . . My friend's harriers, as they were called, 

 because they used to hunt the hares, were of a grotesque 

 character, not definable as a whole by any rules of 

 Beckford or Somervile. The deep-toned, blue-mottled, 

 the dwarf foxhound, the true bred harrier, the diminu- 

 tive beagle, all joined in the cry and helped to supply 

 the pot. Being somewhat strangers to one another, 

 discord prevailed — having a butcher for one master, 

 a baker for another, a farmer for a third,* spreading 

 pretty well through the village. With such hetero- 

 geneous qualities, and not in social intercourse, with 

 an impenetrable country to hunt over, whippers-in were 



* Manifestly a trencher-fed pack, then common in rural 

 England. 



