THE CONDITIONS OF HUNTING. 241 



question I confine myself tO' my own experience, though I have 

 at times known of dozens of cases of which I had no personal 

 knowledge. Indeed, I have received at the Field Office during 

 a course of years many letteirs from Masters of hounds com- 

 plaining of the difficulty in which they were placed, and I have 

 actually known of more than one resignation of office, owing 

 to the scarcity of coverts open to hounds in the early autumn. 

 Wheitheir all this will crop up again I do not know, but as 

 the hand-reared pheasants have almost entirely disappeared 

 it may be that the big bags which were the aim of many covert? 

 owners and shooting tenants have gone for good, and that 

 covert shooting will be conducted on more simple lines. In my 

 early days I had the good fortune to live in a country where 

 game preservation did not interfere with fox hunting, and 

 where such a thing as strained relations between hunting men 

 and shooters were absolutely unl^nown. Surtees, writing on 

 this very subject, makes Proudlock, the gamekeeper at Beldon 

 Hall, when asked about the fox preservers in his neighbour- 

 hood, reply: " Well (hum), there are (hum) scaly people in 

 all countries." But if there were any in the countries where 

 I first hunted I never heard of them. And there was plenty 

 of game preservation, with a gamekeeper on every estate, but 

 the shooting men were, for the most part, the hunting men 

 also, and they preserved foxes as strictly as they did their 

 game. The several Masters of my early days took hounds 

 exactly where they wished, and had to consult no one about 

 their meets. Men fixed their shooting days after they had. 

 seen the listi of hounds' appointmentiS, and if it were found 

 that there was likely to be any clashing it was the shooting 

 day that wasi altered. Moreover, there was a, general feeling 

 throughout the country that the fox was a sacred animal, and 

 once when a dead fox was found when hounds were drawing 

 a. ooverti the whole field was horrified, until a, farm laboiurer 

 appeared with the information that the carcasei had been lying 

 there since the last time hounds were in the covert, and that 

 he had been intending tO' bury it, but had forgotten to do so. 



Some twenty years or more after the period I have been 

 writing about I was hunting in quite another part of the 

 kingdom, and I quickly found that such and such a covert, was 

 closed to hounds until after a certain day in November; that 



