62 THE BEST OF THE FUN 



fox a good one ! " was framed years before you or I first 

 looked on at fox-hunting. If he proves himself a bad one, 

 you will have all the leisure you want. 



A good old fox, in condition, is in a grass country 

 nearly, if not quite, as stout and enduring as a foxhound. 

 If the weight of his coat and his brush don't kill him — 

 or he has not supped too well overnight — he is just as 

 strong as his pursuer. Of the various foxes you have 

 seen run to death, how many of them do you know to 

 have been killed without having been shouted at, baulked, 

 frightened, or extraneously hurried on their way ? 1 can- 

 not at this moment recall ever a kill without a view or a 

 holloa associated with some part of the run, however 

 little attention was paid it by hounds or huntsman. Poor 

 Reynard had felt it or heard it, and it had hurried his 

 heart-beat, and hastened his fainting footsteps. Else 

 might he have — as so often he has — beaten hounds fair 

 and square on a fine scenting day. 



A huntsman — they teach me — can never afford to let 

 a good fox get far ahead of him. On a blazing scent his 

 fox never will, unless the man in office is culpably slow. 

 But give him "half a chance," he will turn a moderate 

 scent into a weak one, and distance it out altogether 

 before he is tired. With a short-running fox it does not 

 matter — except that by pressing him hard you may make 

 him a good fox in spite of himself. " Have at him ! " 

 then, is not a bad maxim (it is a lovely cry as we used 

 to hear it in Leicestershire). A varmint huntsman is the 

 man to show sport. 



What are your whips about, you ask, if they can't 

 keep cattle and sheep away from the hounds ? So they 

 can, and so they do, often. But apart from the fact that 

 they may at the particular moment be equally busy doing 

 something else, it is not always politic, nor even possible, 

 for a whip to rush out of the fray to get between hounds 

 and bullocks. I am speaking of the large, excessively 

 combatant, fields of the Grass Countries. If he dash 

 forward, and the Master — or, where he is hunting his own 

 hounds, the all - necessary Field-Master — be not imme- 

 diately at hand to direct and control, why, there may be 



