THE COMMON OR BROWN HARE 277 



Mr Charles Richardson once witnessed, but not on a single 

 day, the running off of twenty-seven courses without a single 

 kill ; this was in Durham on a thin covering of snow rendered 

 slippery by an overnight frost turning into a thaw.^ 



As the greyhounds always run at their very best pace, the 

 most remarkable feature of the sport is, apart from the high 

 speed, the quite short time occupied by each course. The 

 mere "run up," i.e., counting from the moment of slipping 

 till the quarry is overtaken, is accomplished with almost 

 lightning-like rapidity. The remainder of the course lasts 

 but little longer. It is said that the three final contests of the 

 famous Waterloo Cup, the blue ribbon of the coursing world, 

 occupied in 1889 no more than forty-nine, twenty-eight, and 

 eighteen seconds respectively.^ The first may be considered 

 quite long, the latter comparatively short, but courses of both 

 longer and shorter duration occur frequently.® 



The excitement and uncertainty of coursing has been 

 nowhere more vividly portrayed than in the following sentence 

 from The Noble Arte 0/ Venerie : * — " It is a gallant sport to see 

 how the Hare will turne and winde to save hyr selfe out of the 

 dogge's mouth. So that sometimes even when you thinke 

 that your Greyhounde doth (as it were) gape to take hyr, she 

 will turne and cast them a good way behind hyr : and so 

 saveth hir self by turnyng, wrenching, and winding, until she 

 reach some covert and so save hyr life." 



It is when running before harriers that hares give examples 

 of their powers of endurance in another direction. The " Master 

 of Game " was pretty near the mark, as regards the average 

 endurance of the animal, when he wrote:* "A hare shall 

 last well four miles or more or less, if she be an old male hare." 

 But in February 1789, in Essex, one is stated to have covered 

 more than twenty miles in two hours.® Another, started on 

 Stoke Down, ran, as "it was supposed, . . . near fifteen miles 

 in three-quarters of an hour."^ The older records were, no 

 doubt, exaggerated, but there are plenty of modern examples 

 of straight runs exceeding five or six miles, without, so far 



* The Hare, cit. supra, 124, 128, 130. 



2 "White Flag," Irish Field, 20th February 1899. 



' See under Irish Hare. * Anno 1575, 246. 



^ Op. cit., 15. 6 Daniel, op. cit., i., 330, ' Ibid., loc. cit. 



