270 FOX-HUNTING IN THE SHIRES 



one beautiful bitch is working well, putting them right 

 neariy every time, but, alas ! she is like a famous 

 hound a M. F. H. once pointed out to me in his pack. 

 " Do you see that bitch ? Well, she is too useful to 

 draft ; she is never wrong ; but I have to tell a man 

 off never to lose sight of her, for she is as mute as a 

 mouse." She ought to have been drafted relentlessly 

 all the same, as indeed all hounds should be that slip 

 away silently, however good they are in other ways. 

 They mar, in fact, more sport than they make. 



But to return to our run. We are now working up 

 with one well-known covert in front and another to 

 the right, and at a hedgerow hounds check. The 

 huntsman casts along the hedge and over the road and 

 touches a feeble line. Then we give it up and go to 

 draw elsewhere. The fox had run up to the hedgerow 

 and, turned by a horse and cart in the turnpike, he 

 had run a little way along it and then crossed it. 

 Look round now. Every one is here because it is 

 the sort of run that suits that proportion of men and 

 horses in every field who are very good at the pace 

 they can go. As the day begins, so it ends. We 

 have several similar hunts and find ourselves at the 

 close of the day not two miles from where we started. 

 That is an ordinary everyday Leicestershire hunt, and 

 very pleasant it is. The line was quite jumpable 

 almost everywhere, and where a too upstanding fence 

 has stretched across our path, why, there has been 

 time to go round by the " open door." We jog home 

 feeling that all is for the best in the best of all possible 

 hunts. That is the prose of hunting. Now let me 

 see its poetry, drawn like the former from nature. 



We will suppose that we are present at one of the 

 red-letter days of the season. A fine old dog-fox was 

 taking his rest in a warm corner near the boundary 



