138 SPORTING IN BOTH HEMISPHERES. 



entered a public-house in the dusk of the evening, where 

 his presence soon awoke the suspicions of some of those 

 amateur spies with which the kingdom was at that period 

 infested. Suspected, interrogated, he was embarrassed in his 

 answers, and was arrested and dragged to prison. The 

 following day, when they went to conduct their prisoner 

 before the revolutionary tribunal, they found nothing but a 

 corpse, with a book by its side, in the first page of which 

 the agent of the municipal authorities managed to read 

 these words " Ex libris I. M. Condorcet." It was the Mar- 

 quis de Condorcet ! 



The king was interrupted in these reflections by the noise 

 of horns and the cries of the different attendants of the 

 chasse. The stag has burst cover. The old dogs have 

 forced him to quit the thick underwood of the forest. 

 Relays of young hounds are uncoupled, and now, who can 

 say where the day's sport will end 'I 



At the hunting parties of the Petlts Environs, there being 

 little cover for the animal, he was soon forced to take a line 

 of his own across country, a circumstance that rendered 

 these chasses much more interesting and difficult than those 

 which took place in the royal forests, where the stag rarely 

 left the cover of the woods. As it was not possible to an- 

 ticipate the course of the stag, so also they could not tell 

 where to place the relays of hounds, and the hunt was 

 carried on with the original pack. If the stag went across 

 the open country, not many horsemen were able to follow 

 him. One had been known to have been turned out at 

 Yerrieres, and taken at Chartres, sixty miles in almost a 

 straight line. 



I have heard another and well authenticated history of 

 an almost fabulous run with a stag, which I will here quote 

 for the amusement of my readers. 



One day Monsieur le Prince de Conde attacked a " stag of 



