BRITISH SPORT PAST AND PRESENT 



hairy Lurcher — though a' fowr be let loose on her at ance, and 

 ye surround her or she rise." What are your great, big, fat, 

 lazy English hares, ten or twelve pounds and upwards, who 

 have the food brought to their very mouth in preserves, and 

 are out of breath with five minutes' scamper among themselves 

 — to the middle-sized, hard-hipped, wiry-backed, steel-legged, 

 long-winded mawkins of Scotland, that scorn to taste a leaf 

 of a single cabbage in the wee moorland yardie that shelters 

 them, but prey in distant fields, take a breathing every gloam- 

 ing along the mountain-breast, untired as young eagles ringing 

 the sky for pastime, and before the dogs seem not so much 

 scouring for life as for pleasure, with such an air of freedom, 

 liberty, and independence, as they fling up the moss and cock 

 their fuds in the faces of their pursuers. Yet stanch are they 

 to the spine — strong in bone and sound in bottom — see, see 

 how Tickler clears that twenty-feet moss-hag at a single spang 

 like a bird — tops that hedge that would turn any hunter that 

 ever stabled in Melton Mowbray — and then, at full speed north- 

 ward, moves as upon a pivot within his own length, and close 

 upon his haunches, without losing a foot, off within a point of 

 due South. A kennel ! He never was and never will be in a 

 kennel all his free joyful days. He has walked and run — and 

 leaped and swam about — at his own will, ever since he was nine 

 days old — and he would have done so sooner had he had any 

 eyes. None of your stinking cracklets for him — he takes his 

 meals with the family, sitting at the right hand of the Master's 

 eldest son. He sleeps in any bed of the house he chooses, and, 

 though no Methodist, he goes every third Sunday to church. 

 That is the education of a Scottish greyhound — and the 

 consequence is, that you may pardonably mistake him for 

 a deer dog from Badenoch or Lochaber, and no doubt in 

 the world that he would rejoice in a glimpse of the antlers 

 on the weather gleam, 



" Where the hunter of deer and the warrior trode. 

 To his hills that encircle the sea." 



154 



