NORTHERN COUNTRIES 103 



it was found, I have strong grounds for believing, a dis- 

 tinctly convenient attribute at more than one period of 

 the day. 



The Morpeth pack — wiry and hard-working as it 

 seemed on this hot, tiring day — is to be recruited with 

 some twenty-one couple of Lord Portsmouth's, just pur- 

 chased by Mr. Cookson, and will thus, in improved strength 

 and capacity, go shortly into the new good kennels he has 

 erected near Maldon Park. 



Some useful larch plantations — of the same type that, 

 with the gorses (or, as they term them in the North, 

 whins), form so many of the coverts of the Tynedale 

 country — lay close to the meet of to-day, and from the 

 second of these, Higham Dykes, a travelling fox broke 

 quickly away. Indeed, it takes but little time to recognise 

 that nowhere more than in Northumberland is it necessary 

 for all hands to be on the qui vivc when hounds are draw- 

 ing. In these bramble-carpeted brakes foxes jump up to 

 the first touch of horn, and seldom linger a moment before 

 facing the open. 



Ranee, a quick man, with a quick eye, and an un- 

 deniable rider over this rough-fenced country, had his 

 pack out at once to the Master's holloa, and the run began. 

 With difficulty at first : for a couple of dusty fallows 

 retained scarce a line — luckily, as it happened, for the man 

 who came there to see ; for he — I — had begun by running 

 my untutored head against the only wired fence in the 

 district, and had to creep back as best I could through a 

 bullfinch that had apparently never known hedge-cutter's 

 knife since Northumberland became a county, though the 

 sheep had done their duty by keeping doorways open here 

 and there through its base. They work their weapons 

 differently, do these northern hedge-cutters, to our knights 

 of the bill-hook, and happily too, for if they once took to 

 bending and laying the thorns on the top of the narrow 

 little banks, how would it be possible to ride over such 

 manner of fence ? No, they limit themselves, as far as one 

 can see, to slicing off occasionally all the best of the wood ; 

 the sheep assist them by nibbling off every shoot they can 

 reach, and the holes, or some few of them, are then mended 



