28o l^ie Post and the Paddock. 



Dick only replied, " He carried me middling ;" but 

 he did not rest till " The Squire" had bought him 

 next day for 120 guineas. Perhaps his greatest feat 

 was when the latter rode him in a tremendous run 

 of ten miles from Billesdon Coplow to Ranksboro' 

 Gorse. The pace was so great that at the bottom of 

 Ranksboro' Hill only five out of some 170 scarlets 

 were left, and at this point Sir Harry Goodricke, Mr. 

 Holyoake, and Mr. Maher were fairly choked off; 

 while Mr. Osbaldeston and Mr. Greene, on his noted 

 bay mare, ascended it side by side. The hounds 

 dwelt a little in the gorse, which let up some strag- 

 glers, and pointed away towards Whissendine with a 

 fresh fox ; and it was the wondrous turn of speed he 

 showed when Mr. Osbaldeston raced to stop them, as 

 they were running a hare, which jumped up right in 

 their line, when they had run about two miles, that 

 so astonished every one who saw it. The run this 

 day was still hardly so fast as that from Thorpe 

 Trussels to RoUeston, in Mr. Greene's mastership, 

 which was done without a semblance of a check in 

 fifty minutes, the hounds fairly racing away from the 

 field. The Quorn have seldom had as fast a thing, 

 except when they ran Burgess's black-and-white 

 terrier three miles without a check, and finally earthed 

 it under some of the large lumps in its owner's coal- 

 hole. " Have you seen the fox .?" roared the puzzled 

 huntsman to a ploughman on the line ; and '' Noe, but 

 I seed a little bit of a hound, a hundred yards ahead, 

 leading 'em beautifiil,'' was the still more puzzling 

 reply. Even Mr. Meynell would quite have condoned 

 such an offence ; as, when a gentleman once com- 

 plained to him that he had been out on a very wild- 

 scenting day, and that the hounds " had commenced 

 with a fox, had a turn at a hare, and wound up with a 

 polecat," he replied, very much to his friend's surprise, 

 that he " wouldn't give a fig for hounds who wouldn't 

 run riot on such a day." The words were scarcely 



