THE FOOT DEAG 43 



when meets are far out and the early start will interfere with your 

 work [he was a medical student and had to work hard], but can 

 pick the near meets, when you can shp out on your bicycle a little 

 late if necessary." He never went, I suspect because he was a decent 

 fellow, sensitive and somewhat shy of introducing himself to a field 

 the major part of whom are a made-up party of fairly intimate 

 friends. 



The point for the moment is that the sporting instinct will find 

 vent somewhere, and that undergraduates, whose opportunities of 

 sport are necessarily few, will, if they can do nothing else, at least 

 go ratting either in Mr. Callaby's and other like rat-pits, or in the 

 stackyards of the surrounding country. But where this is the case 

 there is always a desire for more reputable and legitimate sport, 

 which desire is exactly supplied by beagling. It is therefore a 

 remarkable coincidence that the wall which still bears the name of 

 " Callaby " should mark the site of the first identifiable kennels of 

 the Trinity Foot Beagles. 



In this early stage they were not known as " T.F.B." or even as 

 " The Foot Beagles," and were just a " bobbery pack " — 

 Mongrel, pupjiy, whelp, and hound. 



This was in the early sixties. But I had better give the original 

 documents. 



ExTEACT OF Letter by Mr. W. W. Eouse Ball, 

 Fellow of Trinity College. 



" I have been told by old members of the College that they 

 understood that a pack was kept by some Trinity undergraduates 

 in or about 1849, and was dispersed about 1855 or 1856. I have, 

 however, failed to get any precise information, and I cannot say if 

 this was so." 



This contribution is valuable, as it corroborates other verbal 

 traditions of some sort of a pack of hounds having been kept for 

 hunting on foot, for many years before the days of W. E. Currey 

 and Mr. Courtney Tracey. The Farmer's Booh, whose heterogeneous 



