96 STAG-HUNTING RECOLLECTIONS 



such a pack of hounds as the Queen's, or such a country as 

 England, or such happy things as leathers and top-boots and 

 a plain flap saddle '? 



I spoke just now of successful stag-hunting. I admit 

 the difficulty of exactly defining what this means ; it is a 

 pastime so full of paradox and anomaly and contradictions, 

 but at all events I know what i understand by it myself. 

 To begin with, the deer should go right away out of his 

 cart like the ' Lord of the Valley.' We had a deer called 

 Blackback, who would take off from the floor of the deer-cart 

 just as if it was a spring-board, and strike straight away into 

 his gallop. Mind you, it was not fear, it was courage made 

 him do so. Blackback was a most easily handled deer, quite 

 understood the nature of things, and never showed any signs 

 of terror or even anxiety. In the next place, I do not like to 

 see a deer often during a run. He should go straight away 

 in the Blackback style, and hardly be seen again until he has 

 had enough of it. I do not like to see or even hear any more 

 of a deer, once the inevitable cart business is over, than I 

 should of a fox, given the same conditions of country. In the 

 run I have just touched upon, I only saw Bartlett once at 

 Bearwood : hounds had turned back very short and sudden in 

 the fir woods near the house, and hearing them turn I got a 

 nick up the high road. I saw him jump in and out of it 

 three hundred yards in front of me as quick as thought — just 

 as you would like your horse to go in and out of a road 

 in a point to point race. That day we ran a point as the 

 crow flies of twenty miles — twenty-four a gentleman from 

 Slough, whose horse succumbed the same night, declared, 

 and it must have been thirty miles or more as the hounds 

 ran. This same deer pleased me in the same way when we 

 ran him from Aldershot to within a mile of Sutton, near Aires- 

 ford, when H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught was out w4th us 

 and saw all the best of it and in the right place. In the long 



