Scarlet 257 



he was so very relentless on the subject of riot, that 

 at one time he kept a buck-rabbit, who was carried 

 into the kennels every morning, and became such a 

 veteran at the business, that it went hopping about 

 and nibbling the sterns of the culprits, while the whips 

 laid on lustily, and cried " Ware hare! Cooin, yoimg 

 men, get your whips',' became a regular morning salute ; 

 but one of them rebelled at last so stoutly, and said 

 he would resign rather than do it, that the boiler ate 

 the rabbit, and ended the system. In his fourteen- 

 stone days Stephen hunted a pack in Mr. Corbet's 

 Shropshire country, and it was then that the old dog 

 jumped a park wall, and killed his fox by himself in 

 that memorable style, which still makes the Shropshire 

 roof-trees ring again in response to " One cheer nioi'e 

 for the blood of old Trojanr 



Tom Moody and Tom Sebright's t m d 

 father were his whips ; but although he ^" 



was a very great rider, there was no hunting talent 

 about the former to justify the hero-worship which 

 song writers and painters have accorded to him. He 

 was a little eight-stone man, sweet tempered, but de- 

 cidedly dirty, and would as soon as not keep on his 

 boots at a stretch, from Monday till Saturday. His 

 whole existence centered on hunting, and as he 

 could not read a word, his spare summer time 

 was devoted to fishing. He never scrupled to 

 give up his money to Mrs. Goodall when he was 

 sober, and beg to have it by only a shilling at a time ; 

 but he had, like poor Tom Flint, " always a pain in 

 his chest" as he called it, going to covert, which did 

 not admit of the cold water cure ; and his gigantic 

 horn which was filled with ale, not once, but a hun- 

 dred times too often, was soon the only relic of him 

 above ground. 



And so we leave the great first whip of ^^_ Femeiey's 

 the eighteenth, and pass on to the still Quom Hunt Pic- 

 greater master of the nineteenth century, *"^^- 



S 



