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CHAPTER XIII. 



BREEDING OF HUNTERS. 



" Sad and fearful is the story, 

 Of the hunt in Leicestershire ; 

 On that fatal field of glory, 

 Met full many a dashing squire.* 



DO persuade Meynell to give up the chase: he has 

 been hunting the fox these thirty years, but 

 human glory has its Hmits." So wrote Sidney Smith 

 to the mistress of Quorn Hall in the days of its 

 highest renown, with about as much effect as when 

 he preached the " sermon smelling of sulphur," in 

 the training metropolis of the East Riding. Men, 

 whose hearts are with the racer and the starting post, 

 may sicken and tire as their years count up ; but the 

 votaries of horn and hound fondly love on to the 

 close, with all the constancy of the turtle-dove. They 

 want, as a Yorkshire Earl pithily expressed it, when 

 he bade his annual good-bye to his yeomanry troop, 

 nothing all winter but twenty couples of leaders, 

 and to keep no lines but their own. While, how- 

 ever, they agree on these great points, it is strange 

 to note how almost every sportsman of experience 

 seems to have a pet theory of his own as to the quaH- 

 ties of a hunter, and the precise plan of breeding 

 them — a problem which, year after year, puts to con- 

 fusion the hoariest spae-wives in paddock lore. The 

 mythical cit who is popularly supposed to have met 



