162 ACCIDENTS TO HOUNDS IN CHASE. 



Trying as the circumstance of being frequently beat 

 by your fox is, I think accidents to the hounds are by 

 far more annoying, nevertheless they are not of very 

 frequent occurrence. In the neighbourhood of coal- 

 pits and mines hounds sometimes disappear rather 

 suddenly, and when hunting near rocks and cliffs, fall 

 over and are thus destroyed. During the time I 

 was hunting on the Yorkshire coast, I never met 

 with anything like a bad accident, although the 

 hounds on one occasion killed their fox on the top 

 of a bank above the sea, which gave way while they 

 were worrying him, and let them down about thirty 

 feet upon the sands ; it was not sufficient to injure 

 them, but it knocked out the wind, and the fox ran 

 away for one hundred yards into the breakers, before 

 they laid hold of him a second time and finished him. 

 Mr. Hodgson who was in the Holderness country 

 fourteen years previous to his taking Leicestershire (to 

 which country I have just alluded) met with a far more 

 serious misfortune in 1838, being his last season in 

 Yorkshire, and which is one of the most melancholy 

 disasters that ever befel a pack of hounds in chase. 

 They had run their fox from the neighbourhood of 

 Burton Agnes to the Speeton Cliffs, which are about 

 four miles to the north of that well-known point Flam- 

 borough Head ; being near their fox they flung them- 

 selves too close to the edge of the precipice, and in 

 their ardour four or five couples went down the 

 distance of two hundred feet, some were dashed to 

 pieces, while others escaped by lodging in their descent 

 upon some parts of the rock which jutted out. Ned. 

 the whipper-in, with great gallantry descended in a 



