54 THE BEST OF THE FUN 



and sunshine played diligently upon the reluctant earth, 

 preparing it fitly for the morrow at Crick. 



On Saturday, by the way, I had been taken (as an 

 offset, possibly, to one of those heavy extra meals with 

 which good Christians celebrate the season and prepare 

 for themselves a gouty future) to see a pack of harriers, 

 or rather, as light happened to be failing and did not 

 admit of much time upon the flags, to view the champion 

 dogs of two successive years at Peterboro'. I confess 

 with shame and humiliation that I am as ignorant of the 

 lines upon which harriers should be shaped, as a certain 

 great sheep-and-scenery painter evinced himself with 

 regard to those of the horse in last year's Academy — 

 or, take another instance, viz. that of the original 

 sculptor of the Iron Duke a cheval. (1 had almost for- 

 gotten, though the fact by no means palliates my present 

 criminal unenlightenment, that I myself once aspired to 

 hunting a pack of harriers. This was in Japan, where 

 hares were not plentiful, and where even a red-herring 

 had to find a substitute in a red mullet. The pack died 

 off hound by hound — like sheep — from the very un- 

 sporting cornplaint of flukes-in-the-liver, till at last old 

 Rubicon threw his solitary tongue on the trail of the red 

 mullet, when he, too, turned up his toes. The note of 

 the hound was perforce hushed in Japan, for there was 

 no draft available within some 6000 miles, and already 

 we were under orders for home and fox-hunting. Our 

 best fun, I should add, was — particularly during the 

 declining existence of the pack — obtained by starting the 

 red mullet across country by moonlight. But then the 

 country was all plough ; there was never a bone in it — 

 and the bulk of the field was made up of very youthful 

 subalterns, much more easily replaceable than harriers.) 



But to return to the Aldenham champions, it seemed 

 to my unskilled eye that if they had been rather bigger 

 they would have passed for very decent foxhounds. (If 

 there be anything depreciatory in the remark, let me 

 recall it instanter, with the request that it be considered 

 unuttered.) The kennels overlook some of the pick of 

 the Harrow Vale — in which, nowadays, the harriers have 



