CHAPTER II.

THE FOXHOUND.

THE most perfect of his race is the foxhound— perfect in shape, in pace, in nose, in courage. Not one of his canine companions is his equal, for in addition to his merits as a mere quadruped, as a hound he is the reason for the maintenance of expensive establishments, for the breeding of high class horses, and generally for giving an impetus to trade and causing a "" turnover," without which the agriculturist might starve and the greatness of our country be placed in peril. Our bravest soldiers have been foxhunters; our most successful men in almost every walk of commerce have had their characters moulded in the hunting field, or later in life have regained their shattered health by gallops after hounds across the green meadows of the Midlands or along the broad acres of Yorkshire.

At the present time there are over 190 packs of foxhounds hunting regularly in the various districts of Great Britain, and I am well within the mark when I

estimate the cost of keeping up the kennels, including hounds, food, wages of hunt servants, masters' expenses, &c., at over three million pounds per annum. Nor do these figures attempt to cover the ordinary expenses disbursed by those hunting men who have not hounds of their own, the cost of their horses, their keep, and other items. What in addition these amount to cannot well be ascertained, but he will be a bold man who attempts to deny that foxhunting, as one of our national sports, possesses a place in the economy of the State. Special trains on our great railway system are repeatedly run to fashionable meets of foxhounds. Some large hotels are to a considerable extent supported by customers who visit them because of their contiguity to foxhound countries We have been called a nation of shopkeepers -a nation of foxhunters would have been more appropriate. One way and another the expenditure upon this healthy amusement during each successive season may be reckoned in millions of pounds sterling, and still there are so called humanitarians who decry the sport as a discredit to our country. Lord Yarborough says the cost of hound keeping at over four and a half millions yearly, and estimates that 99,000 horses are engaged therein. Another authority tells us that in Yorkshire alone

the seventeen packs of hounds, including harriers, hunting there are kept up at a cost of not less than 500,000l. per annum. Of course such figures, in the absence of carefully compiled statistics, can only be approximate.

"The fox was made to be hunted, and not to kill geese and lambs," said a sporting farmer to me one day, "and he likes it too," continued the good agriculturist," or would he take such long rounds as he does when he could lurk and skulk about and baffle the hounds whenever inclined to do so." Maybe our good red fox does like to be hunted; at any rate, when bedraggled and beaten he seldom looks sad and pitiful, and the hunter loves him as much as he does his hounds; and why should he not love him and hunt him at the same time? The most kindly of all men, Izaak Walton, implies that an angler should love the worm with which he baits his hook, and no one decried such sympathy, excepting, perhaps, the cruellest men of the Lord Byron type.

Foxhounds have for more than three hundred years been carefully bred and reared for hunting purposes, and for that length of time the sport has been carried on in England pretty much on the same lines as now, taking into consideration the change in our mode of living and in the cultivation of the

land. But long prior to this period, foxhunting was a fashionable pastime, and Edward II. had a huntsman named Twici, who, early in the fourteenth century, became an author and an authority on sport. He said:

Draw with your hounds about groves and thickets and bushes near villages; a fox will lurk in rude places to prey upon pigs and poultry, but it will be necessary to stop up earths, if you can find them, the night before you intend to hunt; and the best time will be about midnight, for then the fox goeth out to seek his prey

The best time for hunting a fox is in January, February, and March, for then you shall but see your hounds hunting Shun casting off too many hounds at once, because woods and coverts are full of sundry chases, and let such as you cast off be old and staunch hounds, which are sure. Let the hounds worry and kill the fox themselves, and tear him as much as they please.

And so proceeds the ancient royal huntsman, who doubtless enjoyed his sport in those times with as much gratification as do we ourselves at the present day.

Although thus early there were hounds similar to those of modern times, they were not kept entirely for the purpose of hunting the fox, and to be actually perfect in work they should not be entered to any other quarry. There is some amount of uncertainty as to the earliest date when hounds were kept solely for the chase of the fox. I quite agree with that painstaking and researchful writer, Mr.