WEEK AT MARKET HARBOROUGH 87 



crowd and disregarding holloas, but still it taxes the 

 skill of a huntsman to bring his hounds out and 

 steady them on the line when they are excited by 

 the shouts around them. " If the members of a 

 deaf and dumb institution kept hounds," says Whyte- 

 Melville on this point, " what a lot of foxes they would 

 kill." 



Nimrod goes on to describe the start such as we 

 often see it to-day — six couple of hounds away and 

 the leaders of the field alongside them, the other 

 hounds racing up to join their sisters in front, the 

 crash of the hedges and the rattle of the timber. 

 Personally, I delight in a find from Glen Gorse ; it is 

 so charming a transformation scene. We start from 

 the prosaic highroad, along which one of the hateful 

 machines driven by steam is labouring and rattling 

 with a trolley behind it. We edge up a narrow, muddy 

 lane with the covert on the right and a couple of 

 " this-land-to-be-let-on-building-lease " sort of suburban 

 fields on the left. There is a scrimmage through a 

 gate, and lo, there stretch before us the green uplands 

 of Leicestershire. " The Vale of Cashmere of hunting 

 countries," says Nimrod ; but if he had been to 

 Srinagar, he would not have thought this a sporting 

 simile. Under our horses' hoofs the turf is far firmer 

 and more springy since it was drained than it was 

 in Nimrod's time ; for Leicestershire, I have heard 

 from oldsters in my youth, was terribly deep before 

 the present system of drainage was adopted. The 

 fences are the same, save that here, even more 

 than elsewhere, the " oxer " has disappeared. But 

 in the rough and ragged bit of country below 

 Stoughton things look much as they did a century 

 back. 



Another writer who rode a run from Norton Gorse, 



