THE STAGHOrXD 129 



North Devon lemon pyes that with the wind right you could 

 hear them four miles off on a good scenting day. At one or 

 two r()ii.L;ii hairy places that day the noise was tremendous, 

 and the black and tans would certainly have been heard a long 

 way off. Every hound meused and waited his turn, throw- 

 ing his tongue freely. In his ' Eiding Kecollections ' Whyte 

 Melville speaks of Lord Wolverton's hounds running at a 

 great and sustained pace ; of their charging the fences like 

 a squadron of heavy dragoons, and so on. Now an all but 

 solitar}' experience counts for nothing, but certainly nothing 

 of this sort appeared either in the Vale of Blackmoor or on 

 the Wycombe day. Nor, I confess, on the former day did 

 they ' turn like a pack of harriers ' to their huntsman, in spite 

 of his marked and unwearying deference to all their humours 

 and susceptibilities. Whyte Melville knew a great deal about 

 hunting. Like Kingsley, whom he admired so cordially, 

 he knew all about it instinctively. Added to this intui- 

 tive knowledge he had diversified his ideas by the test of 

 countless experiences of hounds, horses, and countries. But 

 in this appreciation of the Talbot as a stag-hunter, setting 

 aside the observations he makes on the umbrageousness of 

 his disposition, his natural wish to please an old friend, and to 

 commemorate the pleasures of bygone days must have led him 

 a little further than he really intended to go. However, most 

 people would quite as soon be wrong with Whyte Melville 

 as be right with any other writer on sporting subjects. 

 Mr. John Roden, who bred eight couple of Lord Wolver- 

 ton's hounds when first he started his pack, writes of them 

 in a letter to the ' Sporting Gazette,' May 2, 1874 : ' They 

 will not be driven or stand cracking a whip ; they get sulky 

 or cross ; they must be let alone, and the slower they go the 

 more beautiful the hunting. ... In work they do not cast 

 like other hounds ; each hound goes alone and never 

 watches for another dog ; in fact, they never take their nose 



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