The reply brought down a good deal of chaff upon me. Next day, as it happened, we had a good run with an afternoon fox. After passing Yelverton Gorse, I felt sure that the main earth on the Hemploe was his point, and determined to give hounds a helping hand if it could be done; so, riding straight across the vale to the Hemploe, I reached the main earth barely two minutes before the hunted fox arrived, and turned him away. Hounds were coming steadily along, but half-way up the hill several foxes were afoot, and the pack divided, only five hounds sticking to the line of the hunted fox. Payne blew his horn to get them together, and the second whipper-in, attempting to stop the five, I told him they would kill their fox if he left them alone.
I said, “You hear the huntsman’s horn?” and the man did nothing. Very soon after Payne came up, rather angry. The whipper-in, however, disarmed him by confessing that he had done wrong; “But,” he added, “I could not stop them, as Mr. Fellowes said they were killing their fox.” Whereupon Payne laid the body of the pack on the line, and killed in a few minutes.
I had the best of it that evening after dinner.
I was in the famous Waterloo run of February 22, 1866. Its merits have been very much overrated, for hounds were constantly changing foxes, and were never near catching any one of them. It was only a journey.
One of the fastest runs I ever saw in the Midlands was fifty-five minutes, from Thorpe Trussels to Rolleston. William Coke (otherwise known as “Billy Coke”), my old college friend, Stirling Crawfurd, Little Gilmour, and myself were alone with hounds when they killed in Rolleston Spinney; the pace had beaten the rest of the field. Another time I had a very fast gallop from Parson’s Gorse up to Bunny Park. The incident remains in memory, as I had it all to myself on a five-year-old horse, The Kite (by Falcon, dam by Julius Cæsar), belonging to Mr. Crawfurd. The Kite’s portrait, by Ferneley, now hangs at Buchanan Castle.
I had some good horses in those days. In a run from Crick Gorse hounds crossed the Stamford and Rugby Railway, then in process of construction, and enclosed with new double posts and rails. My horse jumped them both, in and out, and I was up when the fox went to ground in the yard at the back of Standford Hall.