THE STAG HOUND 125 



I went up to Chilland to see what was to be seen : a small and 

 poor house on the roadside ; three or four lean paddocks, with 

 black tarred palings adjoined it ; some shaggy thatched stabling, 

 and two or three ricks of hay. The hounds had already been 

 disposed of, but there were two or three horses and I think 

 two or three deer ; but in those days I cared nothing for deer. 

 Inside the house there was nothing, or next to nothing, of 

 interest, but I remember in a glass case a stuffed rat which 

 had stood up for twenty minutes before the Talbots in a 

 twenty-acre turnip-field. However, they stuck to him like 

 leeches and killed him handsomely. It was said that latterly 

 they got so wayward and headstrong— for a bloodhound is 

 never wild in the foxhound sense of the term — that they 

 would run anything from a red-legged partridge to a turkoy- 

 stealer. But in their case it could hardly be called wayward- 

 ness, for Mr. Nevill encouraged them to hunt anything and 

 everything. In a letter to ' ^sop,' Mr. Nevill writes in 1861 : 

 ' I now state to you the different animals the bloodhounds 

 hunt. I often kill fourteen rats a day with them in turnips 

 and hedges, and their cry is equal to their chasing the deer, 

 and with the same energy as when after the stag. Badgers 

 and foxes turned out, and drags, even as far as man, as I 

 have recovered with them stolen goods from a thief. Water- 

 fowl in sedge I occasionally hunt in the meadows for amuse- 

 ment, and sometimes take them. One day I chased a swan 

 for a quarter of a mile in the main river, and to see the 

 hounds swim after him and come again to the bank and rest 

 themselves for a moment, and then gallop away again, was 

 astounding for a sportsman who would hardly believe such a 

 thing. This shows the breed of the magnificent St. Hubert 

 hound.' ^ 



I never saw these hounds in the field, or indeed, strictly 

 speaking, in kennel, but Mr. Xevill had presented my old 



' S'pwtincj Reminiscences of Hcivipsliirc. 



