FOX-HUNTIXG — THE FOX. 55 



allowed to grow old enough to show long runs. In fact, luxury 

 and effeminate habics have deteriorated them, as they will any 

 and everything over which they obtain influence. Whether the 

 foxes of the present day are not better suited to the men of the 

 present day than the old wild ones is a matter into which I 

 shall not enter here. Foxes differ much in various countries, 

 and the goodness of the animal is generally, I fear, in an inverse 

 ratio to the roughness of the country, what is called the shires 

 generally producing shorter runners than rough wild tracts, which 

 many men would not care to ride over. This is partly owing to 

 the absence of large woodlands, for it is a notorious fact that 

 woodland foxes are stouter than those bred in the gorse coverts 

 in an open country, also that stub-bred foxes are much better 

 than those which are reared in an earth. Lord Portsmouth's 

 country is an instance of this ; they scarcely stop an earth in it, 

 and their foxes are very stout ; but, on the other hand, I must 

 say that, save his lordship's own, there is scarcely a keeper to 

 be found in the country, so that there is no artificial feeding, 

 wliich in some measure accounts for it. 



The fox, like the dog, has a wonderful instinct for finding his 

 way home from distant parts, and, some years ago, some cubs 

 were branded and taken out of Whittlebury Forest and turned 

 out in the Suffolk country ; the next season one was killed, after 

 a good run in l!^orthamptonshire, having found its way back. 

 A similar story is told in " Daniel's Eural Sports : " — 



" The old Duke of Grafton had his hounds at Croydon, and 

 occasionally had foxes taken in Whittlebury Forest and sent up 

 in the venison-cart to London; the foxes thus brought were 

 carried the next hunting morning in a hamper behind the 

 duke's can-iage, and turned down before the hounds. In the 

 course of this plan, a fox was taken from a coppice in the forest 

 and forwarded as usual ; some time after a fox w^as caught in 

 the same coppice, whose size and appearance was so strikingly 

 like that got on the same spot, that the keepers suspected it was 

 the fox they had been in possession of before, and directed the 



