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CHAPTER I.

THE BLOODHOUND.

ALTHOUGH many writers have endeavoured to find the origin of the bloodhound in the Talbot of ancient. days, there is no reason to believe that the former had as great a connecting link with the latter as the foxhound and other hounds, of both this country and of the Continent. We have been told of black Talbots, others white in colour, some tawny, whilst pied, or brown white and tan, specimens have repeatedly been alluded to. No doubt from these our ordinary hounds have sprung; but the heavier and more powerful bloodhound must have arisen from some other source. What that source was there is no means of finding out satisfactorily, and the origin of the bloodhound, like that of most other varieties of the dog, is likely to remain an unknown quantity.

In many particulars the modern hound resembles his progenitor of several hundred years ago, not in appearance perhaps, but in character and in apti

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