INTRODUCTION vii 



also. "If I Avere a fox,"" said Mr. Codrington of the New- 

 Forest, " I'd sooner have a pack of hounds behind me than 

 Tom Smith with a stick in his hand.'' But it is just this 

 intimate knoAvledge of the habits of foxes and instinctive 

 sympathy with their nature, that renders the Life of a Fox 

 ahnost as interesting as if, as the title-page asserts, it really 

 had been " wTitten by himself." 



As Nimrod, in his Hunting Reminiscences^ has given what 

 was probably a very faithful appreciation of Tom Smith in 

 his capacity of M.F.H., it may be permitted to make the 

 following extracts from that well-known work : — 



Having seen a good deal of Mr. Smith in the field, and heard 

 more, I hesitate not in calling him a very wonderful performer over a 

 rough country ; and although not what I call an elegant horseman — 

 his seat being looser than I like to see it — no one can dispute his being 

 a good one. Indeed everybody allows that, on a middling nag — and 

 his have not been " from Alceste's royal stalls supplied " — he has few 

 equals. He has not had, like his namesake, the means and opportunity 

 of picking the best. However, I will go so far as to assert that, if I 

 were asked for a subject to enable an artist to represent upon canvas 

 the often-talked-of phenomenon of " a rum one to look at, but a devil 

 to go," I should say, " Take Tom Smith's hog-maned black mare, with 

 himself upon her," that is to say, if the said black mare be still in the 

 land of the living. Believe me, reader, I mean no disparagement. 

 On the contrary, as the bad carpenter never has good tools, so those of 

 the more skilful one generally perform their office. I repeat, then, that 

 Mr. Smith of the Craven is — all things considered — a surprising man 

 across a country. 



I have a more difficult task now to perform in drawing the character 

 of this extraordinary huntsman, for extraordinary he certainly is, and 

 in some respects unequalled by any man who has come under my 

 observation in the character of a Master of Hounds, hunting them 

 himself. And in what consists this striking peculiarity .'' I answer, 

 first, in an enthusiastic zeal for, and an unsubdued spirit in, the pursuit 

 of fox-hunting, which have carried him on in an almost uninterrupted 

 prosperous course from the period when, as a schoolboy, he followed 

 the hounds on his pony, to that which found him hunting the second 

 best country in England. Secondly, there are features in Mr. Smith's 

 character as a huntsman that appear to be peculiarly his own, and 

 for which I have reason to believe the hunting world give him full 



