pensioner, have extra quarters and comfort bestowed on him, and so live out his natural life. His progeny remain in the kennels at Ascot, among the pillars of the present pack, which now has J. Comins as Royal huntsman, and the Earl of Coventry as "Master of the Royal Buckhounds.” It seems rather strange that the mastership of the Royal Hounds, once hereditary, is now a "political" appointment, a Liberal holding the office when that party is in power, and vice versa It is said that in their early days the Brocas family held the position for 270 years, when Thomas Brocas, the thirteenth in succession, sold the appointment to the Watsons, of Rockingham Castle. The emolument connected therewith is £1500 per annum for the master, whilst the salary of the huntsman is only one-sixth of that sum. In the above I have dealt more particularly with the Devon and Somerset Staghounds and Her Majesty's Buckhounds, they being considered the leading packs of the kind in this country. However, in Ireland we have the celebrated Ward Union, within easy distance of Dublin, the kennels being at Ashbourne, Co. Meath. These hunt three days a week. The Co. Down, South West Meath, Longford, Templemore, and the Roscommon likewise provide sport for the stag hunter in Ireland, and with the general surroundings of all these hounds no fault can be found. In England Lord de Rothschild's may be mentioned as a strong pack, numbering about thirty couples of hounds, and they are kennelled at Ascott, near Leighton, in Bedfordshire. The Enfield Chase likewise have twenty-three and a half couples of entered hounds, and the Surrey twenty-five couples, and whose country being round about Redhill, and pretty handy for the Londoner, usually produces larger meets of riding men than some of the neighbouring farmers like. There is a pack of twenty-five and a half couples, and a very old one, that still hunts the New Forest; and a capital centre for the visitor to work from is Lyndhurst or Brockenhurst. Captain Lovell, on his retirement in 1893, had hunted these hounds for upwards of forty years, when they were but known as the New Forest Deerhounds. It need scarcely be said here that the deerhound is a different animal altogether. Captain Lovell's last meet as master was about a record one, for a royal" was killed after running some sixteen miles in about an hour and a half. The New Forest Hounds hunt both the wild fallow and red deer, the former annually until the first week in May. As there are comparatively few red deer in the forest, |