242 THE KORTH STAFFORDSHIRE HOUNDS. 



Staftbrd Hunt was unavoidably severed. Mr. Arthur 

 Heath was a well-known cricketer, and played for Oxford 

 V. Cambridge for four years in the later seventies. 



If we were asked to name two of the hardest and 

 foremost riders to hounds of the present day with the 

 North Stafford pack, we should be inclined, from all we 

 have seen and heard, to single out Mr. W. W. Dobson, 

 of Seighford Hall, and Mr. F. Vaughan- Williams, of 

 Eccleshall Castle. Mr. Dobson came into the country 

 as a youngster more than twenty years ago, and soon 

 showed not only that he was a capable, but a de- 

 termined rider, and it did not seem to matter much 

 what his mount was, for whatever he was he had to 

 gallop and jump with the best of them. The writer 

 remembers the late Mr. Corbet saying of him, quite 

 in his early days, "If that youngster had but my ex- 

 perience with his nerve, what a clinker he would be ! " 

 Well, since then the experience has come, and the nerve 

 has not diminished, and Mr. Corbet's prediction has been 

 fulfilled. Mr. Dobson joined the Hunt in his premiere 

 jeunesse about twenty-one years ago, riding in those early 

 days some raw youngsters, with which he did wonders by 

 dint of pluck and natural horsemanship. He has told the 

 writer that on his first day with these hounds from 

 Madeley, in November, 1881, neither he nor his mare 

 being used to a ditch-and-bank country, he took no less 

 than three falls, and finally had to get the assistance of 

 a ploughman with his team to draw the mare out of a 

 boggy ditch, somewhere between Wrinehill Wood and 

 Finson's Hay Gorse. It did not take him long to get well 

 entered to our ditch-and-bank country, and since those 

 days he has often led the field in many a rattling gallop, 

 havino- developed into an experienced and excellent horse- 

 man, and for years past he has ridden the best of cattle, 

 and has given long prices for some of them. With youth 

 and vigour still on his side, he bids fair to go on for years 

 in the first flight, and to hold his own with all comers. 

 His best horses have been Polly, a brown mare by 



