“And what do you think of our hounds, Mr. Softly?” said old Plumtree, now putting in a word, as he sent the bottles round a second time; a signal for the young ladies to depart, and for me to open the door to let them out—a manœuvre I accomplished with the best grace I could muster, and an uncomfortable conviction that they might, and probably would talk me over, not without critical disapproval, immediately they were settled in the drawing-room.
As we took our seats round the fire, which sparkled pleasantly amongst the glasses and decanters on the little round table, my host repeated his question, adding, whilst his son almost imperceptibly elevated his eyebrows, “Don’t you think now, as a sportsman, that we’re all inclined to breed hounds a little too fast?”
This was obviously old Plumtree’s crotchet, and I resigned myself to my fate.
“You must get pretty quick after a fox some part of the day, if you’ve a mind to kill him,” I replied; because I had heard a huntsman once say something of the same kind. And Jem likewise put in his oar with the remark, that “slow hounds, in these days, would never get from under the horses’ feet”—an observation received by his father with that silent contempt which a man would consider extremely rude to a stranger, but which, nevertheless, he does not scruple to betray towards those who have the advantage of belonging to his own family.
“Oh! I grant you that,” said the old gentleman. “A fox is a speedy animal himself, and it stands to reason that if you are to catch him, you must some time or another go faster than he does. But haste is not always speed. A man may be in a devil of a hurry, and yet slip two paces backwards for every one he advances. The same process that kills a hare will kill a fox. The keeping constantly at him, not the bustling him along best pace for ten or fifteen minutes. Now, your hounds of the present day are always flashing over the scent into the next field. Either you waste a deal of valuable time by having to try back; or if your huntsman is as wild as his hounds, he gallops forward blowing his horn, makes a wild cast, and loses him altogether. Either way you destroy your own object, which I take to be the enjoyment of riding in a gallop with hounds that are running with their noses down, and the enjoyment of hunting by seeing the sagacity of a close-working pack, persevering through difficulties, and rewarded with a kill.
“I’m an old fogey, I grant you, Mr. Softly. If I do ever go out to look at the hounds, it’s on a pony; and I can no more see, the way ‘Jem’ there goes, than I can fly; but let me tell you, I could have beat his head off, and given him two stone of weight into the bargain, when I was his age. It’s not that I want hounds to stay behind with me, that makes me say they’re bred too fast nowadays: far from it. I like you young fellows to enjoy yourselves, and have brushing gallops, and comb your whiskers well out in the bullfinches, and sew up your horses and come home, and drink ‘fox-hunting.’ Ring the bell, Jem; we’ll have another bottle of that claret. I think I know what riding is, if I haven’t forgotten it. You see that dark-brown horse over the fire-place? That’s a good likeness, Mr. Softly; and that was the best horse I ever had in my life.”
Raising my eyes in obedience to my host’s behests, they rested on a picture enclosed in a most gorgeous frame, representing a brown horse with rather a long back and wonderfully short legs; his tail reduced to the smallest dimensions, and his ears, so to speak, at full cock. This animal, in the highest possible condition, and with every muscle standing out from its body to a rigid degree of tension, was depicted in the centre of a flowery mead, over-shadowed by large trees in their densest summer foliage, gazing fixedly at a red-brick mansion, on the further side of a sheet of water which had by no means found its own level, but was represented in the abnormal condition of covering the side of a slope. I gazed with admiration not unmixed with astonishment. Delighted with the obvious impression, my host went on:—
“I don’t think I ever had one that could go on like ‘Supple-Jack.’ I called him Supple-Jack, Mr. Softly, on account of his breed. He was by Bamboo, that horse,—was out of a mare they called Twisting Jane; and no pace was too good, no day too long for him. We didn’t think so much of jumping in my day as they do now; at least, we didn’t talk about it so large; but you might lay the rein on Supple-Jack’s neck, and trot him up to any gate in this country, and he’d take you safely over it. Why, Jem there will tell you, when he was a boy, he’s seen the old horse, when he was past twenty, jump the gate backwards and forwards, into the paddock by the little orchard, only to come and be fed. Jump, indeed! they couldn’t go far without knowing how to jump, in my day.
“Well, sir, you talk of runs; why, I rode that horse the famous Topley day, with these very hounds, when we found in Topley Banks, immediately after the long frost, and killed our fox on the lawn at Mount Pleasant, eight miles as the crow flies, in thirty-four minutes. Talk of pace, sir! you can’t beat that in these flying days. I never got a pull at my horse from first to last; and, barring a bit of a scramble at the Sludge, where the banks were rotten from the sudden thaw, he never put a foot wrong. Zounds, sir! I don’t believe he ever changed his leg. The late Earl and myself got away together from the Banks, close to the hounds. He was a good man across country, but he couldn’t ride like his son. There were a dozen more close behind us, but they never got near enough to speak; and the Earl and I went sailing on, side by side, over the Sloppington Lordship, and all along by Soakington Pastures, not far from where you’re staying now, Mr. Softly, till we got within sight of Tangler’s Copse, where you were to-day. That and the prospect of a nasty overgrown bullfinch, with only one place in it, made up uncommon strong, tempted the Earl a little out of his line, and I never saw him again. Supple-Jack and I had it all to ourselves after that, and he carried me over the ha-ha, on to the lawn at Mount Pleasant, just as the hounds rolled their fox over, under the drawing-room window. There was a large party staying in the house (your poor mother was one of them, Jem), and they all thought the frost was not sufficiently out of the ground to hunt, and so had remained at home.
“‘Where do you hail from?’ said old Squire Gayman, the proprietor, who had served under Nelson.