i62 STAG-HUNTING RECOLLECTIONS 



Queen's Hounds ran over it several times in my day. I 

 remember one particular day hunting a deer on a cold but 

 faiiiy holding scent across Hartford Bridge flats. As they 

 hunted like beagles, and chanted their Gregorian, and now 

 and again spread like a sky-rocket, the men and I — to use a 

 West Riding expression — were 'rarely suited.' One season 

 we had an outlying hind about Bramshill ; we never caught 

 her, but she came back of her own accord one day to the 

 Paddocks, and in at the Paddock gate,' which Groves, the 

 deer-keeper, propped open for her. She was so difficult to 

 harbour that we called her Hide-and-Seek. Like, an en- 

 chanted deer in a German fairy tale, she seemed to know 

 what we were about. Once she had been harboured in a 

 small wood below Bramshill House for several days, and 

 used to go out and feed every night on some turnips. The 

 very day the Queen's Hounds met at Bramshill to try to catch 

 her, they seemed to hit a line on their way to the meet over 

 Hartford Bridge Flats. Of course, we never found Hide- 

 and-Seek, and the very same afternoon she was seen hanging 

 about Swinley Paddocks. As far as I remember, she again 

 worked her way back to Bramshill, and eventually came 

 home to her friends and the old beans and clover hay at 

 Swinley. 



When ' Ninirod ' made his tour of inspection of the reput- 

 able hunts of his day, he dismissed Sir John Cope's country, 

 as it was then, in a very cursory way. My boy was at 

 a capital school just against Eversley Green, under Brams- 

 hill, and I remember his saying in a rather homesick letter, 

 ' The fir-trees are very dismal.' ' Nimrod ' was of the same 

 opinion. ' It [Sir John Cope's country] partakes,' he says, 

 ' of a sort of Cimmerian darkness in November,' and he 

 warns the hunting aristocracy, whose society he affected, 

 against its clays and sands, bogs and heath, immense fuel 

 hedges, deep, blind ditches, and bad foxes. 



