80 THE SOUTH DEVON HUNT 



We have seen^ that Sir Henry Seale had the entire 

 management of Sir Walter Carew's hounds at 

 Haccombe during the season 1842-3, at which time 

 he was also !Mayor of Dartmouth. Sir Henry's 

 father, Sir John, seems at first not to have looked 

 upon the arrangement with unqualified approval, for 

 Sir Henry says in one of the letters referred to in an 

 earlier chapter :^ " My father enquires about the 

 hunting, and seems not to mind it, as I have attended 

 most closely to the duties of Mayor." In another 

 letter of later date he says : " My father and mother 

 came here (Haccombe) on Wednesday to stay a day 

 or two, and I hope the former has retm^ned home 

 with a httle better regard for foxliunting than he 

 came with. I mounted him on my little mare, in 

 good wind and condition for the roads, and took him 

 on above the hounds so that he could see them find 

 (as they did in good style). . . ." 



After stating that at a certain point in the middle 

 of the run, " AMio should appear, but my father, in 

 the very heat of it ? He had seen the fox cross the 

 road . . ." he concludes with the remark : " I do 

 think my father would get on as well as most of the 

 field now ; he was delighted with the run and the 

 hounds. . . . Templer dined here afterwards. I 

 \sish you had been here to hear the old chap talk 

 over wonderful runs in former days." 



From the quotation at the beginning of this 

 chapter, it appears that Sir John Seale himself kept 

 a pack of harriers. 



It was when Sir Walter Carew gave up his hounds 

 in 1843 that Sir Henry Seale first started keeping 

 a pack of his o\^-n. He purchased a remarkably neat 

 lot of small hounds from Mr. Blundell Fortescue of 



1 See p. 43. 



