58 A MONTH IN THE FORESTS OF FRANCE. 



hounds, and those not of the largest, but of a mode- 

 rate but powerful size. Having seen the condition 

 of the pack, I no longer wondered at w^hat my friend 

 told me, that the French hounds wanted energy and 

 stoutness, for that when they tired in the forest and 

 lay down they slept there, without doing as the Eng- 

 lish hound always did, walking home at once to his 

 kennel. He told me that after hunting a wolf several 

 of the French hounds tired, when, scratching a bed 

 for themselves in the bushes, they went to sleep ! the 

 wolf then, having had just enough exercise from 

 the chase they had given him to make him hungry, 

 returned to the line and dined on any single hound he 

 met with so laid up, to the manifest diminution of the 

 pack. Indeed, from what I have seen of the fatness 

 of one or two hounds in every French pack that has 

 come under my notice, if these fat hounds had lain 

 up, the wolf could only have considered it as a gift 

 fatted purposely for " his larder," and therefore in 

 civility as well as out of ferocity he was bound to eat 

 him. 



" Well," I said as we left the kennel, ^' if you will 

 permit me, I will give Saxon and some of the most 

 sickly of these hounds a little alterative medicine ; 

 and, as we do not use any of them till Tuesday, when 

 also we need not take out the worst of them, I hope 



