own experience, which I cannot forbear quoting in full :

'I remember once, when hunting a boar with a very steady pack of bloodhounds, that I reached a piece of open ground in time to see a stag break cover in front of them. I would not have them stopped; I hurried on to the next wood, and got to the other side of it only to see the stag break again and cross a little river, and then a field, the hounds still following and hunting keenly, even the best of them. Naturally I began to feel uneasy; pushing on briskly to a certain crossing-place a mile and a half on, I saw my boar pass it, followed at a hundred yards distance by the same stag. When the latter saw me he turned on one side; the hounds came up, and without doubting an instant went on upon their boar, whose line had simply been covered by the stag's.'

Hounds so trustworthy as this must be very good; yet, good as they seem to be, and freely as they are trusted, an efficient pack is in France only reckoned half the battle. Emergencies and difficulties are sure to arise which all the woodcraft of the men will be needed to surmount, especially if the hunted deer join others. For then the best hounds often refuse to have anything more to do with the chase, and if none but young hounds are carrying the line there is little chance of forcing the stag to leave his com

panions, or of hitting the right and not a wrong line when he separates from them.

Accurate knowledge of the slot of the stag to be hunted, acquired if possible before he is roused by prickers and sportsmen capable of utilising it, is therefore insisted upon as being as necessary as good hounds to those who would chase a stag to his death. And curiously enough, though in the great forests of France the deer must see less of mankind than they do with us, it is remarked that they constantly seek refuge among the habitations of men when they feel that their end is near. If the last stand is made in water, the hounds generally drown their quarry; no longer need the hardy sportsmen swim out, sword in hand, to give the death blow; but if the deer stands to bay on land, they either shoot him or hamstring him with the hunting sword, similar to a bandsman's, which This is another remi

the huntsman and whips carry. niscence of the days when men went to the chase armed as for war, and there are many others about the final ceremonies. The deer is skinned, the head being left attached to the hide, and the best of the joints are removed; the skin is then spread over what is left of the carcase, a pricker stands astride of it and holds the head upright, while the hounds are brought up; they are shown the dead deer, and stopped once

or twice from breaking him up to make them obedient. Then the skin is whipped off, and they are allowed to enjoy their portion while the horns blow the appropriate melody.

The horn still plays an important part in foreign hunting; all men belonging to the establishment, even those on foot, carry horns, the list of authorised sounds being nearly as long as that in our Cavalry Drill-Book ; and though a great brass instrument that goes twice round your body must be an awkward thing to fall on, yet in a wooded country I have no doubt that when intelligently used it is exceedingly useful. The French horn appears in the sporting pictures in the hall at Longleat, and when the seventh Sir Thomas Acland kept the staghounds (1784-1794), according to Dr. Collyns,' he used to furnish some of the servants with French horns. 'These men were stationed at different spots round the covert, and gave notice that a warrantable deer had been viewed away by playing a particular tune upon the instruments.' Mr. Collier, writing in the 'Badminton Magazine' for January, 1896, says the French horn was likewise used in South Devon, and that if a man sounded the wrong call at the wrong time, he was made to taste the whip at the end of the day.

1 Chase of the Wild Red Deer, p. 85.

CHAPTER III

IN DEVON AND SOMERSET

1

THE stag-hunting of which we have records in the West-country does not seem to have ever had very much in common with that which I have attempted to describe in the previous chapters. Probably the civil war took all restraints off poaching, and dispersed many a pack of hounds: moreover, after the confiscations that followed, the landed gentry could not afford to keep up hunting establishments on the scale that prevailed in France. Hunting, besides, is a much simpler affair in open country than it is in forests,

1 The Windsor pack, however, was kept up. See Whitelocke's Memorials for 1649: August 22nd.-I sent out my keepers into Windsor Forest to harbour a stag to be hunted tomorrow morning : but I persuaded Colonel Ludlow that it would be hard to shew him any sport, the best stags being all destroyed, but he was very earnest to have some sport, and I thought not fit to deny him. August 23rd.-My keepers did harbour a stag. Colonel Ludlow, Mr. Oldesworth, and other gentlemen met me by daybreak. It was a young stag, but very lusty and in good case. The first ring which the stag had led the Gallants was above twenty miles.'

and deer are apt, when their strongholds lie far apart, to make points for distant covers in a way that renders the task of a second horseman difficult enough, and would reduce that of a dismounted whip in charge of a relay of hounds to an impossibility.

Moreover, wild animals except deer were exterminated in England long since, so the woodcraft which has been fostered abroad by the survival of the boar and the wolf has not had in this country the same chance of justifying its existence and making itself useful.

It is recorded' that King Francis I. and Sir Thomas Fitzwilliam, after a long discussion of the English and French methods of harbouring and hunting deer, agreed to differ as to the merits of the two systems. This looks as if there had been some recognised distinctions in the practice of the two countries, though of these there is no trace in the old English works on the subject. One of the joint authors of the first sporting book in our language was a Frenchman, and little is said in it about stag-hunting. Its successors, from the Mayster of the Game,' written for Edmund Langley, fifth son of Edward III., till Dr. Collyns published the Chase of the Wild Red Deer,' in 1860, are all practically translations from the French ; and I cannot ascertain that there was any dif

1 Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII., vol. i., No. 1160.