72 VAGARIES OF SCENT 



not take the trouble, as I have done myself, to go out 

 of their way to try and find out how best to solve 

 some of the many difficult problems which present 

 themselves in sport. 



One thing, however, I may assert, and without fear 

 of contradiction, which is that scent is such a com- 

 plicated enigma that it requires to be combated by 

 extreme measures ; and this I have many a time 

 proved to be the case. No matter how cold the soil, 

 or how holding some good grass-land may be, there 

 are days on which it is impossible to do anything. 

 Men at once exclaim, ' It's quite useless ; hounds can't 

 pick it up !' etc. But on such days, when I have 

 heard of other packs failing to do anything, I have 

 known these dwindle foxhounds of mine race to the 

 finish. On one occasion — and there are still several 

 persons living who will remember It, amongst them Mr. 

 Wilfrid Blunt (of Arabi Pasha renown), whom I had 

 mounted on that his debut in the hunting-field — we 

 were hunting a hare, a pottering brute, round and about 

 the well-known Fairy-house course. When close to the 

 house we put up a fox out of some gorse in a ditch in 

 which the hare had squatted. There was no time to 

 think of the latter, and as I had a few select strangers 

 staying with me, and the scent seemed so bad for hare 

 hunting, I laid the pack on the fox, which I had seen 

 sink the wind down the bottom of a ditch. The field 

 were none the wiser, but thought we were still on the 

 hare. That fox took us as straight as the crow flies 

 for Dunboyne, and then on to Roosk fox covert, where 

 the earth-warner happened to be, and he, thinking it 

 was the Meath Hounds which he heard racing towards 

 him, stopped the earth ; and if it had not been that my 



