CHAPTER III 



" PAT " CURIIEY 



God rest you, merry gentleman ! 



Old Carol. 



ITH the Mastership of W. E. 

 Currey the continuous his- 

 tory of The Foot Beagles, 

 as they were originally 

 called, begins, and there 

 are traces of the early 

 traditions of those days in 

 our present constitution. 

 Beaslincp had heretofore 

 been spasmodic, because 

 sport seems always to have 

 been provided by private 

 individuals who happened 

 to own packs of " little dogs,' and to bring them up to Cambridge. 

 The result of this, of course, was that, when the owner of the pack 

 went down, he as likely as not took his hounds with him, and unless 

 a successor with a pack could be found " the scheme fell through." 

 There was, for example, no beagling between 1855 and 1862, and 

 there was a second interregnum of one or two years before Mr. 

 Currey brought his pack up from Ireland. The vicious system, or 

 rather non-system, of private ownership still continued, but efforts 

 were made to secure continuity by purchasing the pack when 

 Currey gave up, and so the tradition arose that though each Master 



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