142 HUNTING. 



used to say to me, ' Hounds are like children, they do not like to 

 be left behind, and if they know you will not wait for them they 

 bustle to ,et after you ; but if they know you will wait, they 

 don't hurry themselves, but they will stop just inside the fence 

 peeping at the huntsman and pack waiting, and will not come 

 out till they see them moving off (this, of course, when there is 

 no fox on foot) ; or if hounds are away with a fox will try and 

 do a bit of hunting for themselves, in some independent way ; 

 and why ? because they know that some one will come back and 

 fetch them.' Bill Long was nineteen years a whipper-in and 

 twenty-seven years a huntsman, and first class in both capacities. 

 Some years later Tom Clark (who began in Devonshire and 

 Hampshire, whipping-in to Captain Howarth who hunted his 

 own hounds, and then was in the Shires and eventually hunted 

 the Old Berkshire, when kept by the late James Morrell) came 

 to me as huntsman, beginning the cub hunting in the season 

 1857-1858. He was excellent in the kennel, conditioning the 

 hounds well, and giving them real good long summer horse 

 exercise, and he could kill a fox in the open or in the wood- 

 lands when once found as well as any huntsman I ever saw. so 

 that it was a pleasure to hunt with him. He was wonderfully 

 cheery and fond of a gallop. I learnt many wrinkles from 

 him, enjoyed many a good day's sport, and saw him kill many 

 a good fox that would have beaten a less expert huntsman 

 than 'Sagacious Thomas.' I think he spoilt my hounds by 

 his anxiety to get away for a gallop. He would stop them 

 off the fox they were running, and lay them on to another 

 that had gone away, so that they lost that excellent quality 

 of not changing from one fox to another, which in Bill Long's 

 day they had. After a long run if they got to a covert with 

 fresh foxes in it they would not change, but stick to and kill 

 their own fox. Clark's system of galloping lost them that, and 

 they have never recovered it. He was, however, inferior in 

 intellect to, and less observant than, Bill Long, would often 

 draw over a fox, was proverbially a bad finder of foxes, and his 

 system with the whippers-in was bad. In the first place, it was as 



