42 



THE TRINITY FOOT BEAGLES 



to try our dogs. Mr. Callaby himself was quite a link with the past : 

 he wore a top hat, a wiiite spotted blue choker over a Gladstone 

 collar, a short black cut-away coat with side pockets, and tight- 

 fitting trousers. His dress was just that of " The 

 Fancy," in the days of Tom Sayers and the Benicia 

 Boy. He had very thick leather gloves for hand- 

 ling his rats. He was very old and skinny in the 

 eighties, and is now, of course, dead, and his establish- 

 ment broken up. Yet the big black letters of his 

 name and vocation are still on the wall just as they 

 were. The place carried one back to the coarser 

 days of the early Victorian and half- mythical 

 aquatic undergraduate, who was some sort of a 

 survival in amphibious guise of the athlete sports- 

 man of the Eoad and Regency days, and drank 

 and fought with bargees at riverside inns, and kept 

 fighting dogs. The type is caricatured in Verdant 

 Green. All this testifies to an innate desire in man 

 to hunt something somewhere, if it be only, as Lord 

 Randolph Churchill said, a rat in a barn. This 

 brings me to a necessary digression. 



I had among my pupils a thoroughly nice little man who was 

 poor, belonged to a small college, and was in every way undis- 

 tinguished. He played Rugby football of a technically humble sort, 

 but was a countryman and at heart a sportsman, to whom hunting 

 or "killing somezing"^ was a necessity of life. To satisfy his 

 instincts he kept ferrets in the backyard of his lodging-house, and 

 secured facilities for ratting in farmers' stackyards. Somehow he 

 came to confide in me, told me of his ferrets, and consulted me as to 

 their health and care, and confessed to a desire for beagling, and 

 wished to know how to proceed. I told him, " You have only to go 

 out, and if you like it pay your subscription. You need not go 



' The quotation is from tlie following yarn, a French criticism of the English 

 character : — 



" In ze morning 'e get up and 'avc cold tol). 'K come down and 'avc rosbif for ze 

 breakfast. 'E go to ze vindow and 'e say, ' Mon Dieu ! 'tis a iine day ; let us kill 

 somezintr ! ' " 



