Hound Breeding 171 



breeders millions of dollars, simply for the thing so many of 

 them scoff at style and beauty. "Fancy breeding" in- 

 deed! Five thousand dollars are paid for a bull, ten 

 thousand for a horse, when a bull of equal weight could 

 be bought in the States for fifty dollars and for two 

 hundred dollars a horse that could draw as large a load. 

 A five-dollar dog could bark at a squirrel quite as well as 

 one that cost five hundred dollars in England. The high 

 prices are for style, symmetry, beauty. One may shout, 

 "Handsome is that handsome does," until he is black in 

 the face. Simple utility in anything is a matter of pennies. 

 It costs dollars, and hundreds of them, to buy style and form 

 and beauty. There is no use going to England for the 

 best pack of hounds in that country if a man does not ap- 

 preciate what it means and has cost to produce them. 

 They would only deteriorate on his hands. England may 

 be slow and behind the times in some respects, but in the 

 art and science of breeding she is two hundred years ahead 

 of America. In the last few centuries there have been 

 developed in England half a dozen or more new and dis- 

 tinct families of horses, cattle, sheep, swine, poultry, and 

 dogs, while in the States there are only the standard bred 

 trotter, produced more by accident than by design, and the 

 " American Dominion " hen, which latter, I am informed, is 

 now well-nigh extinct. 



It may sound unpatriotic to say all this of one's own 

 country, but the writer's great desire to see American 

 breeders generally, and American masters of hounds in par- 

 ticular, take hold of this question of breeding for improve- 

 ment on a plane level with their intelligence must be his 



