204 HUNTING IN MANY COUNTRIES. 



meet was at Lodge-on-the- Wolds. Hunting had been stopped 

 by a not very severe frost during the latter half of the 

 previous week, and the result was that there was a far larger 

 field than was then usual at this particular meet. I 

 remember being penned up with the crowd, like sheep, in 

 a lane, during the morning, and seeing very little; but after 

 two o'clock, when about two- thirds of the field had departed, 

 hounds got away on good terms with a fox, and ran for about 

 an hour and ten minutes, making a point of five or six miles, 

 and finishing with a kill — I think just on the Bel voir boun- 

 dary. I was with Mr. Fernie one day when they ran twice 

 from the neighbourhood of Glenn to the Leicester racecourse 

 at Oadby, and after a Sleaford coursing meeting I had a 

 rattling good day with the Belvoir in their Lincolnshire 

 country, on a horse kindly lent to me by the late Mr. F. Ward, 

 of Quarrington. 



About this time, too, I had days with the Queen's, the 

 Old Berkeley, Old Surrey, Surrey Union, and quite a number 

 of Saturdays with the Garth, always on the Virginia Water, 

 Chobham to Chertsey side of the country. In 1895 I went 

 to the Burstow one early November day, and was so pleased 

 with what I saw that I repeated the visit some thirty or forty 

 times that season; but the pack did not court publicity in 

 those days, and though I was connected with a hunting paper, 

 my accounts of the doings of the Burstow were few and far 

 between. On the day of my first visit hounds met at God- 

 stone station, and it was blowing such a gale that hunting 

 seemed out of the question, and covert after covert had been 

 drawn blank before someone viewed a fox, hounds being 

 quickly after him. He could not face the wind, and the 

 upshot was that hounds ran down wind for forty minutes 

 and killed in the open. On such a day this was a very big 

 performance, and I know that I was a good deal impressed 

 with it. The late Mr. Henry G. Hoare was then in his last 

 year of mastership, and though foxes were very scarce all 

 over the best part of the country, hounds showed a lot of sport 

 whenever they had the opportunity. The great days of the 

 season came in the spring, and it will be remembered not only 

 for the sport shown, but because it was the last day on which 

 Mr. Hoare rode to hounds. This day has been described in 



