FOX-HUNTING IN THE SHIRES 9 



while never a horse could draw near to the pack as 

 they flew on, yet those horses had the best blood in 

 England in their veins, and the condition which two 

 or three seasons of hard food and hard work had given 

 them. 



It is this constant work in the open which is one of 

 the charms of the Shires. The prizes in the lottery 

 of scent, too, are more often drawn here than else- 

 where. It is, then, because men can always hunt and 

 always, when there or thereabouts of course, see what 

 is going on, and because the chances of a run are 

 greatly increased by the fact that if there is a scent 

 there is nearly certain to be a fox, that people are 

 drawn to the Shires in their thousands. 



But the reader is not to suppose that there are no 

 drawbacks to hunting in Leicestershire. In the first 

 place, there are the hills. The Midlands are not, as many 

 people picture them, a wide tract of level grass. In 

 the neighbourhood of Market Harborough, for example, 

 the flats by Welham are almost the only very level 

 districts, all the rest being a sea of rolling waves of 

 grass and hills, more or less steep and almost equally 

 trying to a horse, whether he has to gallop up or down 

 them. Parts of the Cottesmore country are even more 

 abrupt ; and the Tilton district, though excellent for 

 sport, is desperately hard on horses. The Pytchley is, 

 indeed, in some parts flatter, but then the pastures 

 are less extensive, and the fences, always stiff, seem 

 even more forbidding when they come more frequently 

 in our way. But even in the valleys and on the hills 

 the ground under our feet is not smooth. Everywhere 

 the fields are in what is called ridge and furrow. If, 

 as we have said, the whole district is of rolling waves 

 of grass, every field has ripples across its surface, 

 sometimes long like a swell, and sometimes short like a 



