138 STAG-HUNTIXG RECOLLECTIONS 



front if he gets there, thanks to a good start or to some httle 

 accident in his favour. 



A strong deer nearly always involves a certain period of 

 pursuit about which there are few pleasurable agitations. 



The fastest are failing, the truest are tailing, 

 The Lord of the Valley is over tlie hill. 



He always is, or seems to be. It is an idiosyncrasy of stag- 

 hunting, and these dull bits must be relieved by racing pace 

 contrasts. Everyone knows a particular sort of hound — he is 

 as ubiquitous a type as the pug-fox, ' who always will get him- 

 self headed somehow. The hound I am thinking of seems to 

 be always behind, though always galloping. Incessantly you 

 pass him, repass him, and yet overtake him again. Yes, there 

 he is again, staunchly pursuing, usually with his ears back. 

 He catches your eye each time out of the corner of his own 

 w^ith an amiable ' Here-we-are-again ' twinkle. Fox-hunting, 

 he may often have many fair — or at all events plausible — 

 excuses to offer, and we may be certain he would state them 

 admirably. Even stag-hunting he might have something to 

 say in his defence, and complain of the wagonettes and 

 lighter vehicles which keep up wonderfully well. But in stag- 

 hunting excuses cannot be accepted. The first year I had the 

 hounds, we had one or two of the sort. With a couple or two 

 more unprofitable servants they found their way to the boards 

 of a great London theatre — a box for the men being a part of 

 the consideration very properly insisted upon by Harvey — 

 and nightly enlivened the vicissitudes of a hunting party and 

 the echoes of an enchanted forest in a most lifelike manner. 

 I was told that the way they strained upon the leash 

 after some offal ingeniously displayed in the opposite wings, 

 Ijrought out in much admired relief the well-turned limbs 



' Our fox-hunting ancestors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 

 ilivided foxes into two classes— the greyhound and the pug. The pug was only 

 hunted if no greyhound was forthcoming. 



