300 • COVERT-SIDE SKETCHES. 



whicli it was my endeavour to get as much bone and strength, 

 in as small a compass as possible." 



This must have been, I think, the nucleus of the modern 

 harrier as generally understood, though in the present day it is 

 not easy to arrive exactly at what Beckford meant by the fox- 

 beagle. However, he appears to have hit on what he thought 

 desirable for the chase of the hare, and no doubt many others, 

 as the country was more opened, did the same. Add a slight 

 dash of fox-hound blood, and you have, I conceive, a pack of 

 the type of the late Captain Evans's — real little wonders when I 

 saw them — Mr. Dundas Everett's, or the Earl of Pembroke's 

 (late Mr. Walter Flowers'), although I should surmise that fox- 

 hound blood has been a stranger to these kennels for many 

 generations, and, indeed, hounds of this class are so numerous 

 now that, by an interchange of blood, they may well be kept up 

 to the standard of perfection without it. I believe Mr. George 

 Race, of Biggleswade, has a pack, each one of which is worthy 

 to sit for its portrait, but I must own to never having seen 

 them. 



Besides these, there is another type of harrier I have often 

 seen in the West of England, though never, to my knowledge, 

 a pack of them. These are from nineteen to twenty inches 

 high, fine in the head, clean neck, well formed, and of a lemon 

 or rather sandy and white colour. Their noses are said to be 

 good, and I have been told that a few years ago there was a 

 subscription pack of them at Plymouth, hunted by a man 

 named Yelverton, and they have been spoken of to me as 

 peculiar to Devonshire and the West of England. A few 

 couples mixed with fox-hounds, with which they matched badly 

 in every way, and here and there an individual specimen is all 

 I have seen ; but there was certainly enough character in common 

 amongst them to make me believe that hounds of that type 

 must at one time have existed, and I think very probably 

 the old stag-hound, of which I have before spoken, is accountable 

 lor them — hence their being found in Devon and Somerset, 



