n6 THE SPORT OF KINGS 



Then perhaps there are some distant earths 

 open, and he must ride his hardest to beat a straight- 

 necked fox to them, a feat in which, try as he 

 may, he sometimes comes off second best. He 

 gets a lot of fun, does the first whipper-in, but he 

 does not get overdone with praise by the hunts- 

 man. That worthy takes all his excellent pro- 

 perties quite as a matter of course : " If he wasn't 

 a good man I shouldn't keep him," he argues — not 

 without reason. 



I once saw a very good whipper-in in a very 

 good run, a run for which we were in a great 

 measure indebted to him. To begin with, our fox 

 was making for a river which he would un- 

 doubtedly have crossed if it had not been that the 

 whipper-in forestalled him, and so our run was 

 saved instead of lost. Several times during that 

 run did I see the whipper-in at a critical point. If 

 hounds checked for a moment it was Sam's holloa 

 that put us right ; when hounds ran through a big 

 wood it was Sam that was there to turn the fox 

 away from the earth, and all went well till just as 

 we thought hounds were killing their fox. They 

 had run a nine-mile point, and looked like running 

 straight into him, and then he began to ring, and 

 just as they were about to kill him he tumbled 

 into an open earth. " Didn't you know that 

 this earth was open?" said the huntsman with a 

 look that would have killed at thirty yards. " I 

 thought they were killing him, sir," was the answer. 

 " Thought ! — you should have made sure," replied 

 the huntsman. It may perhaps be thought that 

 the huntsman was a little too severe to his sub- 

 ordinate, but it must be remembered that his 

 omission discounted all his previous smartness, and. 



