THE CHASE OF THE CARTED DEER. 265 



hunting with stag-hounds during any other part of the year. 

 Why this should be so it is hard to say, but any one acquainted 

 with hunting men will allow that it is a fact. The same thing 

 holds good with many masters of harriers, who get a deer to turn 

 out, and give their friends and followers a gallop to finish up 

 with — a practice that I hold in abomination, for several reasons, 

 the first and foremost being that the deer so turned out is very 

 unlike one that has been kept specially for the purpose, and 

 time and care expended on getting him into condition to run 

 before hounds. As a rule, he is a miserable wretch, bought 

 from a dealer in such articles, who sends him or her, as the case 

 may be, from London in some sort of box or crate, in which it 

 can scarcely stand upright, and cannot turn round, where, for 

 fear of accidents, it is kept until the time for turning out 

 arrives. Then tliis cramped captive, generally a fallow buck or 

 doe, is started on its sport-showing mission. How well the 

 task is achieved may be easily imagined from the previous treat- 

 ment it has received. As a rule the poor limbs refuse their office 

 after a mile or two, and a miserable fiasco is the result. Some- 

 times, however, whe;i men who know and understand the nature 

 and management of deer take the thing in hand, better results are 

 forthcoming, and I must confess I have seen a very smart 

 gallop after a fallow buck turned out before harriers. Another ob- 

 jection — the greatest to a sportsman — is the taking hounds from 

 their legitimate game — a course which always tends to disorgani- 

 zation, and brings them to the level of a lot of curs if persisted 

 in. Why the harrier should be considered able to hunt deer 

 with impunity I cannot conceive, or why a day at the end of 

 the season should do him less harm than a day at any other 

 time. Of one thing I am certain, viz., that no master of fox- 

 hounds who took the slightest interest in his kennel, or had any 

 respect for his office, would suffer his hounds to run deer one 

 moment longer than the whips could get to their heads to stop 

 them, on any consideration whatever ; neither, I believe, would 

 such men as the late Captain Evans, Mr. Dundas Everett, ^Ir, 



