272 Silk and Scarlet, 



black cap" of Langton. With him to train, and 

 Sawyer, and then Conolly, to ride, it was perpetually 

 seen in front at Salisbury, Weymouth, and elsewhere 

 in the " south countrie." Grey Marquis, Presentiment, 

 Garus, and Black-and-all-Black alone won with it 

 eighty times ; and the last became such a hero in the 

 Dorsetshire peasants' eyes, that even now they would 

 as soon strike a horse with a twig of hornbeam as 

 believe that their black knight could not have 

 vanquished Eclipse himself. And so the great hunt- 

 ing era of Eastbury passed away on that pleasant 

 June afternoon. The cry of another pack is heard in 

 Coker Wood and Badbury Rings ; but still, long after 

 the present century is numbered with the past, a pleasant 

 tradition will linger round Dorsetshire firesides, of how 

 a former squire of Langton took to hounds when a 

 mere college stripling, and how even his fifty-second 

 and last season found him with a heart as young, and 

 a cheer as shrill as ever. 



Mr Codrincrton South Wilts claims its notice, for Mr. 

 o ring on. (^Q^^j.jj^g|-Qj^'g sake. It was he who en- 

 tered Jem Treadwell, to fox in 1818 ; and when his 

 whip, Tom Snooks, next season, blooded an O.B.H. 

 lad of nine, who contrived to get well up on his pony, 

 when they killed at Stone's Heath, near Powder Hill, 

 he little thought that he was entering a future M.F.H. 

 of that very country, and that the brush Tom pre- 

 sented, and the moustache he so artistically painted, 

 would produce such glorious after-fruits at Tubney. 

 Mr. Codrington was a peculiarly quiet man with 

 hounds ; and as Jem phrases it, " No rating — no 

 whipcord — make them hunt through anything." 

 Grovely and Great Ridge were his pet covers in 

 South Wilts ; and he hunted them once a week re- 

 gularly, and sometimes twice, till the foxes learnt to 

 fly the instant they heard his horn. He was fond of 

 walking round and round a gorse with his hounds at 

 his heels, and then drawing into a meuse ; and like 



