The field is growing thinner as the miles of grass and plough are covered, and the best pack in England would begin to tail! But the game is over. They run from scent to view, Wrangler’s bristles are up, and you may swear it’s who-hoop, For he’ll dash at his fox like a hawk in her stoop, And he carries the head marching home to his soup. And many and oftentimes will Wrangler make a run, till he, too, has, like every dog, had his day. The Master’s heart is steeled, he gives the order (who knows with what regret?), and another hound takes his place with the flying black, white, and tan! IV HARE-HUNTING [Illustration: MR. TOM HILL AND UNDERGRADUATE. Scene in a Cambridge Stable Yard. From a sketch by C. M. Newton.] IV “By inclination I never was a hare-hunter; I followed this diversion more for air and exercise than for amusement, and if I could have persuaded myself to ride on the turnpike road to the three-mile stone and back again, I should have thought I had no need of a pack of harriers.” PETER BECKFORD. I OWE too many pleasant hours to hunting hares to damn the sport with faint praise, but, kind reader, if you notice a want of enthusiasm in the following chapter, pray do not ascribe it so much to my sympathy with the quotation that heads this article, as to my desire to pose as an impartial critic. Silence, care, and science are the qualities that a hare-hunter should pride himself on; youth and high spirits, eagerness and impetuosity are the life and soul of fox-hunting--dangerous qualities in the chase of the timid little hare. I have had many a day with beagles and harriers--many a happy one; and yet in fairness I must make the confession that the days I enjoyed best were those when they got on to a fox. Ah! I fear if I made a clean breast of it, I should have to tell of days when my brother (who had a fine little cry of beagles) and I used to get up before daybreak, mount our horses, and hie off to the moors by ourselves, out of the ear of the sleeping world, to give a belated marauder a jolly good dusting before he made his distant and unstopped earth; and, more rarely perhaps, the eternal craving for “a run” was so great that a man with a bag shook “something” out of it in a lonely spot. Dear me! I could tell some tales. I have in my mind’s eye a day when my brother, with another more famous master of harriers (now, like some others, an M.F.H.), and myself were beaten by the little hounds as they raced away over the moors after an extraordinarily fine-smelling fox; but I must check myself, or my style will degenerate into that of a fox-hunter’s.