28 FIELD AND FERN. 



up the custom of racing for '^The Silver Bells/^ to 

 have an afternoon with John Squires at the Lanark- 

 shire and Eenfrewshire Kennels_, which are three 

 miles from the Houston station on the Greenock rail- 

 way. The country is very open and nearly all grass 

 and moor, intersected with stone walls about five feet 

 high. Bogs are especially plentiful round Duchal, 

 but Squires has "kept pretty well out of them so 

 far.'^ There are a few good gorses, and five or six 

 have been planted, one of them at Fereneze, but the 

 covers are generally small and thin for plantations, 

 and foxes do not dwell a minute after the hounds 

 are in. The cub-hunting is generally done in the 

 great Lanarkshire glens about the Duke of Hamil- 

 ton's, where rocks and trees and underwood abound. 

 A large burn runs at the bottom of each, and it is 

 often asmuch as the hounds can doto hear one another, 

 besides which they frequently fall over the cliffs and get 

 terribly lamed. The foxes lay up their cubs in rocks or 

 old coal and limestone mines, and therefore a find is 

 often very doubtful, and earth-stopping a very heavy 

 item in the accounts. Every meeting involves eight 

 or nine stops, and Houston still more. In his first 

 season of 1862-63, Squires had seventeen blank days, 

 hunting twice a week, but last season there were only 

 two days without a challenge. " Weeping skies" are 

 the rule ; and he told us, in quite a martyred tone, that 

 during his first eight weeks he had only two dry days. 

 It is also a hilly, heavy country, and " horses up to 

 their hocks and knees the greater part of their time." 



