6o STAG-HUNTING RECOLLECTIONS 



what his father was. In this way it came about that he 

 was made whip under his father.' 



So it was settled, and hunting became Charles Davis's 

 profession when he was about twelve years old. But I 

 think he went on with his schooling. His feeder, George 

 Bartlett, who still lives at Ascot, and whose memory is 

 excellent, tells me that George III. gave him 1/. a week and 

 sent him to a school at Windsor, which probably means 

 that the king arranged that he should stay on at school 

 for a little longer, before going into service at the harrier 

 kennels. ' Stoody, stoody, stoody, always stoodying at thy 

 books. Take, I say, my advice, sir, and stoody fox-hunting,' 

 said Luke Freeman — Lord Egremont's kennel huntsman 

 and a great character — to one of his master's sons, the 

 course of whose education interfered periodically w4th 

 his hunting soon after Christmas. Doubtless the young 

 ' sir ' would have been only too pleased to have done 

 so. An open January is a sweet and bitter month to 

 many a schoolboy. But Davis, in spite of such an early 

 apprenticeship to business, must have found time for his 

 books as well as for his hunting. A few letters of his which 

 I have seen are certainly the letters of a man of education. 

 They are written in a graceful, early Victorian hand, the 

 sentences have originality and turn and j)i'ecision, proper 

 words fall into their proper places, and there are no mis- 

 takes in spelling.^ 



The following is quite as good an example of his 

 style as anything I have seen. It is in reply to Sir John 

 Halkett's complaint that his hounds broke away directly they 



' His biographer in ' Baily ' tells us that he had a great liking for reading 

 and that Charles Kingsley and Whyte Melville were favourites. Mr. Bowen 

 May tells me that he remembers Lord Dufferin giving Davis Letters from 

 High Latitudes, and that Davis had told him he had enjoyed reading it very 

 much. 



