FOX-HUNTING IN THE SHIRES 17 



weary draws, with the chance of being sHpped at last, 

 and blank days are unknown, save when the weather 

 is too bad to hunt at all and even the very keenest 

 Masters are obliged to go home. Yet even in the most 

 unpromising weather the fashionable packs will often 

 give you a chance to see sport if you care to risk your 

 horse's legs and your own limbs. There is seldom a 

 day without some sort of a gallop, and walking and 

 trotting after a fox are unknown, for if a pack can hunt 

 at all, they can generally go fast enough to keep their 

 followers moving. 



Thus, the first and second flight men who honestly 

 mean to ride the line, though this is not always possible 

 in Leicestershire even for the boldest, have more sport 

 and more fun than they could possibly obtain else- 

 where. For men of the very first class like Whyte- 

 Melville's young Rapid, Leicestershire is a perfect 

 hunting ground. Every one knows the " Riding Recol- 

 lections," yet if there should be any reader who does 

 not, then I certainly will not spoil his pleasure by 

 quoting from it. Yet I have never seen it remarked 

 how perfectly young Rapid's education and training 

 fitted him for taking and keeping, as he did, the first 

 place in a fast run over a grass country. He was, as 

 we learn from the chapter on the Provinces, the son 

 of a country gentleman who was Master of a pack of 

 hounds, apparently somewhere in the remote West. 

 In the intervals of education, in the Eton holidays 

 and Oxford vacations, he had the opportunity at home 

 of learning the science of woodcraft and of hound work. 

 Nor were these early lessons lost. No doubt he had 

 run with the beagles at Eton, and from Oxford had 

 seen Lord Macclesfield draw Stowe wood, or watched 

 Squire Hall hunting the Heythrop bitches on the " let 

 'em alone " principle over the stone-wall country. 



B 



