CHAPTER XI.
SKETCHES OF HUNTING WITH FOX-HOUNDS AND HARRIERS.
The Fitzwilliam.—Brocklesby.—A day on the Wolds.—Brighton harriers.—Prince Albert’s harriers.
The following descriptions of my own sport with fox-hounds and harriers will give the uninitiated some idea of the average adventures of a hunting-day:—
A DAY WITH THE LATE EARL FITZWILLIAM’S HOUNDS.[176-*]
“Loo in, Little Dearies. Loo in.”
How eagerly forward they rush;
In a moment how widely they spread;
Have at him there, Hotspur. Hush, hush!
’Tis a find, or I’ll forfeit my head.
Now fast flies the fox, and still faster
The hounds from the cover are freed,
The horn to the mouth of the master,
The spur to the flank of his steed.
With Chorister, Concord, and Chorus,
Now Chantress commences her song;
Now Bellman goes jingling before us,
And Sinbad is sailing along.
The Fitzwilliam pack was established by the grandfather of the present Earl between seventy and eighty years ago; they hunt four days a week over a north-east strip of Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire—a wide, wild, thinly-populated district, with some fine woodlands; country that was almost all grass, until deep draining turned some cold clay pastures into arable. It holds a rare scent, and the woodland country can be hunted, when a hot sun does not bake the ground too hard, up to the first week in May, when, in most other countries, horns are silenced. The country is wide enough, with foxes enough, to bear hunting six days a week. “Bless your heart, sir,” said an old farmer, “there be foxes as tall as donkeys, as fat as pigs, in these woods, that go and die of old age.”
The Fitzwilliam are supposed to be the biggest-boned hounds now bred, and exquisitely handsome. If they have a fault, they are, for want of work, or excess of numbers, rather too full of flesh; so that at the end of the year, when the days grow warm, they seem to tire and tail in a long run.