THE WEST CARBERY HOUNDS.
M. J. R.
of office had ended, a farmer summed up for me the opinion that the country people had of him:
“He was the King of the world for them! If he rode his horses into their beds they’d ask no better!”
When he gave up in 1903, I followed him in the Mastership, which I have held, with an interval of four years, ever since. “Of all sitivations under the sun, none is more enviable or ’onerable than that of a Master of fox’ounds,” Mr. Jorrocks observes, and further states that his “’ead is nothin’ but one great bump of ‘untin’!” I do not say that things have gone as far as this with me, but I will admit that the habit of keeping hounds is a very clinging one.
Many congratulations and much encouragement were bestowed upon me when I bought the hounds and took office, but warnings were not wanting. A friend, himself a Master of Hounds, wrote to me and said that it required “the patience of Job, and the temper of a saint, and the heart of a lion, to navigate a pack of foxhounds,” and there have undoubtedly been occasions when for me the value of all these attributes was conspicuously proved by their absence at need.
If Mr. Jorrocks’s estimate of the job is to be accepted, it is, from my point of view, chiefly in the kennels that the “enviable” aspect of mastership is to be found. I have spoken of three hounds, specially beloved, but the restriction of the number is only made out of consideration for those readers whose patience could stand no more. It is customary to despise the ignorant and unlearned in hound matters, but I have too often witnessed their sufferings to do aught save pity. To be a successful kennel visitor is given to so few. I have sometimes wondered which is most to be pitied, the sanguine huntsman, drawing his hounds one by one, in the ever-renewed belief that he has found an admirer who knows how to admire, ending in bitterness and “letting them all come”; or the straining visitor, groping for the right word and praising the wrong hound. In one of Mr. Howell’s books there is a certain “Tom Corey,” who, though without a sense of humour, yet feels a joke in his heart from sheer lovableness. Even so did one of my aunts feel the hounds in her heart. Her sympathy and admiration enchanted my huntsman; he waxed more and more eloquent, and all would have been well had not “Tatters,” a broken-haired fox-terrier, come into view.
“Oh!” exclaimed my Aunt S. rapturously, “what a darling little hound! I like it the best of them all!”