216 HUNTING IN MANY COUNTRIES. 



for the management of the establishment, but for the hold- 

 ing together of a large country. 



In a letter which has reached me from an old friend there 

 is the following : ' ' Do give us one or two of some days on 

 Exmoor." I had, before receiving this letter, almost for- 

 gotten that I had ever seen the famous west country pack of 

 staghounds to which my correspondent refers, and truth to tell, 

 I have not at the moment a great deal to say about the Devon 

 and Somerset, for I have seen just enough of thei pack to make 

 me long for more. Aa a mattier of fact, I had only paid two 

 visits to the pack, and quite recently a third, which will be 

 mentioned in a supplementary chapter. The first was 

 during Mr. Fenwick Bisset's Mastership, in the year fol- 

 lowing the Franco-German war, which was 1871. And my 

 recollections of the trip are too confused for any definite 

 description, though I remember being in one all-day hunt, 

 when the stag was apparently lost, and refound again three 

 or four times, and was finally taken quite close to Exford. 

 But more recently I enjoyed a week that was very full of 

 sport in the west, and to one day I can refer at length, for 

 I was lucky enough to be present at a hunt of four hours, to 

 which several pages were devoted in Mr. Everard's Stag Hunt- 

 ing with the Devon and Somerset, and by this account I can 

 fix the date of my visit to red deer land as having taken 

 place in 1900. I had been staying at Scarborough, and I 

 well remember how, on the Saturday before the Doncaster 

 meeting, I saw, what were then. Sir Everard Cayley's hounds 

 cub-hunting, not very far from their kennels at Snainton. 

 With a friend I left the Grand Hotel (Scarborough) not 

 long after five o'clock in the morning, and had a ten mile 

 ride to cover. A fine amateur huntsman, Mr. Robin 

 Hill, carried the horn, and after a lot of hunting in small 

 coverts, hounds went away with an old fox, and had a capital 

 forty minutes in the open, with a kill at the end. They then 

 returned to cub-hunting, and I remember that it was an 

 awfully hot morning, but that the run took place about seven 

 o'clock, before the sun had asserted himself. There was a 

 long ride home after refreshing at the Master's house, but 

 the upshot of that ride was that the Master of the Braes of 

 Derwent, who was with me, and who could not begin his own 



