To begin at the top, though the Master of Foxhounds, especially nowadays, has of all men the most need of tact and the patience of Job, how many are there in possession of those estimable qualities?
Although James Pigg had his prototype, dear old Jorrocks must be regarded as somewhat of a caricature; but Lord Scamperdale and his bully, Jack Spraggon, were taken from real characters, and the race, I fear, is not now altogether extinct. I have known a master, an old country squire and no ignorant upstart, abuse as a vulpicide another poor crippled squire in his carriage before the whole field, with the not unnatural result that he who for fifty years had preserved foxes throughout his vast extent of coverts solely for the benefit of others, as he could never hunt himself, went home and ordered every fox on his estate to be killed for two years as an object lesson; thereby quite ruining one day in every week. One cannot approve of such wholesale punishing of the innocent with the guilty, but cannot wonder at it. The same master, before throwing off, abused publicly on his own doorstep at a meet another landowner from whose five-acre covert I had myself had the satisfaction of holloaing away no less than seven foxes while shooting the week before. Another Master of Foxhounds in my hearing slanged the best of sportsmen and a keen fox preserver because he himself in a fit of temper had drawn blank at a hard gallop two hundred acres of coverts from which, to my own knowledge, five foxes at least had been halloaed away. My own Master of Foxhounds, a real good sort and an intimate friend, once received me, until I laughed him out of it instead of taking offence myself, with unaccountable coolness at Peterborough Hound Show; though I think he might have guessed that the unpleasing present which he had that morning received of the pads of a litter of cubs was scarcely likely to be sent by a keen preserver of foxes for twenty years with the well-known postmark of his own parish. Obviously I myself was the most injured as well as insulted party. Still, happily, these cases are exceptions in an experience of some scores of masters in every part of England, and I may especially mention the courtesy shown to a stranger in days of old in the Croome and Blackmore Vale countries.