Scarlet. 343 



first, save and except Will Goodall on Catch-me-who- 

 can. " Give me the brush, WilV,' said Mr. Wood who 

 had left his horse and run into the field, 'Tin first iipy 

 " How can that be when Fve got Jiini f" responded Will ; 

 " / wotddnt let you have it for a hundred giuneasT 

 This was on Jan. 9th, 1856, and they killed both their 

 foxes. Well might Will appraise the brush after that 

 fashion, as only once before or since have the Duke's 

 got so far into Leicestershire. On that occasion 

 (March, 1857) they found a fox at Melton Spinney, 

 which left Ranksboro' to the left, through Owston 

 Wood and John O'Gaunt's, and over Tilton Field, to 

 Skeffington, where they ran into him in The Lincolnshire 

 the open. Oddly enough, they had only a . ^"^"s. 

 week before made their longest voyage of discovery in- 

 to the uttermost part of Lincolnshire, in a run of two 

 hours and twenty minutes, from Falkinham Gorse. 

 They crossed the Forty Foot river, and killed him 

 near Pinchbeck, and an old woman who had never 

 seen hounds and scarlet before, drove her pig and cow 

 into her sitting room, screamed that the Russians 

 were coming, and put up her shutters, in anticipation 

 of a siege. After receiving a most scorching bene- 

 diction from one of the natives of those wilds, who 

 gasped out that he was ''cutting all the whate tip',' 

 Will left his horse fast in the mud with a tamer 

 native to hold up his head, till ropes could be got, 

 and ran to the end on foot. 



The Belvoir annals can furnish runs Remarkable 

 quite as remarkable as that, in a different ^'^^^• 

 degree. In that season of 1854-55, when every spring 

 near the Ropsley kennels was dried up, and when 

 Will had to pay eight shillings for each cartfull of 

 water for the hounds; when he never had but one wet 

 shirt himself, and that on the day of the battle of the 

 Alma ; and when he had not one fall, and killed 1 10 

 foxes in 1 12 days, he had a pair of blazing twenty-five 

 minutes, going on at one time. A brace of foxes went 



