148 NOTITIA VENATICA. 



shire, to which country — uaraely, the South Wold — Mr. Ilelher was 

 about taking. 



The hounds were in two horse-hoxes, and on their arrival at Notting- 

 ham, one box having a greater number in than the other, it was truly 

 lamentable to sec, on the box being opened, the state the poor animals, 

 as well as the man who had the care of them, were in ; all being nearly 

 exhausted from the heat arising from the crowded state of the box ; 

 several of them were actually dead, and others died upon being admitted 

 into the open air ; in fact, seven couples of the hounds died from the 

 occurrence. 



Speaking before of accidents from poachers' wires recalls to my re- 

 collection a curious circumstance which occurred some time ago with the 

 Atherston hounds, while drawing a cover of Mr. Chadwick's, near Blith- 

 bury. A hound was missing from an osier bed after it had been draAvn; 

 and upon the whipper-in going back to look for him, he discovered him, 

 after searching some time, fast by the nose, at the end of a poacher's 

 line, having improvidently taken the bait laid for a pike, and which the 

 flood had probably washed on shore. 



During the time I was hunting on the Yorkshire coast, I never met 

 with anything like a bad accident, although the hounds on one occasion 

 killed their fox on the top of a bank above the sea, which gave way 

 while they were worrying him, and let them down about thirty feet ui)on 

 the sands ; it was not sufficient to injure them, but it knocked out the 

 wind, and the fox ran away for one hundred yards into the breakers, 

 before they laid hold of him a second time and finished him. Mr. Hodg- 

 son, who was in the Holderness countiy fourteen years previous to his 

 taking Leicestershire (to Avhich country I have just alluded), met with a 

 far more serious misfortune in 1838, being his last season in Yorkshire, 

 and which is one of the most melancholy disasters that ever befel a pack 

 of hounds in chase. They had run their fox from the neighbourhood of 

 Burton Agnes to the Speeton Clifts, wliich are about four miles to the 

 north of that weU-known point Flamborough Head ; being near then- 

 fox they flung themselves too close to the edge of the precipice, and in 

 their ardour four or five couples went down the distance of two hundred 

 feet, some were dashed to pieces, while others escajied by lodging in 

 their descent upon some parts of the rock which jutted out. Ned, the 

 whipper-in, with great gallantry descended in a basket, and by his forti- 

 tude and exertions some of them were carried up and restored to the 

 pack. The fox, however, escaped by some means or other into a cleft 

 in the rock. 'NVliat Mr. Hodgson's feelings at this dreadful moment 

 must have been, can be better imagined than described. When ho 

 viewed from the svmimit of this awful precipice his favourites Avrithing 

 in the agonies of a lingering death, while their piteous bowlings were 

 only responded to by the greedy and fiend-like scream of the sea-bird, or 

 the dismal croaking of the raven as he watched his mangled prey from 

 an adjoining rock. 



With regard to horsing the men belonging to a pack of foxhounds, I 

 shall write but a few words, as the system of managing hunters used for 

 that purpose is, or rather ought to be, exactly similar to the one i)ursued 



