also,
Some people only use the long rattle at the death, but my opinion is that the eight very sharp notes should be blown, as hounds know that they mean a fox, and a fox only, whether alive or dead.
TEAM AND TANDEM DRIVING.
By Miss Rosie Anstruther Thomson.
Being almost a beginner myself, it is with diffidence that I commence to relate my small experiences in four-in-hand driving. It is only because I have had the advantage of watching a first-rate coachman in my father that I venture to do so—having taken care to gather from him many hints and wrinkles as to what to do, and not to do, and more especially the reason why.
It is, I know, supposed to be easier to drive a team than a tandem, because two horses abreast are believed to be less foolish than two single horses. Personally, I think all horses are astonishingly foolish at times, and, for a lady, a tandem is much less heavy.
Of course it depends in a measure on people's hands whether horses feel heavy and hang, but the weight of four horses on a woman's wrist is decidedly a strain, until, through practice, she becomes accustomed to the feeling—that is, unless the team is so perfectly trained that they almost drive themselves.
In driving a team, the first thing to be learnt is the art of "catching" a four-in-hand whip. It certainly looks easy enough, and many a time have I watched my father, with one upward turn of his wrist, catch it unerringly every time, and felt—"Of course any duffer could do that!"—eagerly proclaiming my ability to do it too. This, however, is an altogether different affair. No twisting, no jerking is allowed, but simply a turn of the wrist, making something like a figure eight in the air, and leaving the thong caught on the stick (never try to catch your thong with the stick) with a loop above and a few turns round the stick below, which brings both lash and stick into your hand together. It is an impossible thing to describe, and the only way to learn it is to get some patient friend to show you how. And you will require all your Job-ish propensities, for it is by no means easy at first, and it makes you feel very foolish when all your efforts fail, after it has looked so ridiculously simple in the hands of an expert. Nothing looks worse than people essaying to drive a team without knowing how to catch their whip, and their wild attempts to attain that end are almost pathetic, for the flourishes they make, end invariably only in a hopeless complication and tangle.