CHAPTER II 



" At length, one windeth where the wave hath left 

 The unguarded portals of the gorge, and there 

 Far-wandering halts ; and from a rocky cleft 

 Spreads his keen nostril to the whispering air ; 

 Then with trail'd ears, nioxes cowering o'er the ground. 

 The deep bay booming breaks : — the scent is found." 



BiLWER Lyttox. 



Although I may not countenance, in this true reminiscence, the 

 poetical hcence of my friend, from whose beautiful poem I take 

 the above motto, wherein he makes the hound own a scent after 

 a tide has been over it, I cannot help selecting the lines on 

 account of their graceful expression. I have seen a hound in 

 my pack of stag-hounds feather on and over the slot of a deer, 

 though he did not speak to it, on the day following that on 

 which the deer had passed ; but a tide would remove every 

 vestige of the line, as no hound could hunt after it had receded. 

 We now come to a period when the hounds devolved upon 

 my brother Moreton and myself, when we made them stag- 

 hounds exclusively, and adopted the tawny coats, in which 

 hue the huntsmen of the Lord Berkeleys always rode. Smith, 

 in his MS. history of our family, speaks of a Lord Berkeley who 

 used to keep his hounds at the village of Charing, with thirty 

 huntsmen in tawny coats to attend upon them. My father 

 maintained the orange, or yellow, or tawny plush for his hunt. 

 Mr. Combe, in remembrance of the name, called his hounds the 

 Old Berkeley, and retained oui' livery ; ^ and it has ever been a 



1 Tlie hunt servants of the Old Berkeley Hounds still wear orange- 

 tawny coats. — Ed. 



