THE WHIPPER-IN 89 



out to the men who were waiting with the hounds upon the 

 lawn : the result may be imagined. Upon remonstrating with 

 the elder of the two upon this most disgraceful occurrence, the 

 answer was, that he was sorry for what had happened, but that 

 he thought there could be no harm in the contents of the 

 bottle, as he had seen a lady drinking some of the same kind 

 through the window just before." 



"This man," adds Mr. Vyner, "had but one fault in the 

 world ; in other respects he was a most excellent and trust- 

 worthy servant, and one of the quickest and best sportsmen I 

 ever saw handle a whip ; he had lived twenty years in two of 

 the most noted hunting establishments in England, but gin 

 became his ruin." 



Drink is a thing that, sooner or later, shows itself in all men, 

 and, perhaps, in Huntsmen and Whips sooner than in most, 

 through the medium of the voice. There is a huskiness about 

 the voice of the dram-drinker, far removed from the joyful, 

 cheerful note of the sound, healthy-lunged, sober man ; indeed, 

 we sometimes fancy that men's voices sound differently after a 

 " lawn meet," to what they do at the ordinary run of the 

 hunting fi.xtures. After the huskiness comes the broken voice 

 of the old practitioner. We have heard men whose notes have 

 been broken right in two. 



It is curious to see how hunting runs in families — to see 

 how certain names pervade our different hunting establish- 

 ments — how like begets like, and son succeeds father. Shirley, 

 for instance, has a son Huntsman to Sir John Cope : old Tom 

 Ball, if we mistake not, has one or two Whipper-in sons — one, 

 we know, whipped-in to Mountford, in Leicestershire, in Lord 

 Sufiield's time, and we think there was another with the 

 Pytchley, during Mr. Payne's first occupation of the country, 

 if not in Lord Chesterfield's reign. Smith, Lord Yarborough's 

 Huntsman, is great-grandson of the first Huntsman of that 



