It may seem strange that the sporting propensity of schoolboys should have thus defied and survived the ban placed upon it by the pious Founder; but the history of Eton shows it to have been always the home of cruel sports. We are told by Sir H. Maxwell Lyte, the historian of the school, that “sports which would now be considered reprehensible were tolerated and even encouraged at Eton in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” “No work,” he says, “was done on Shrove Tuesday after 8 a.m., and at Eton, as elsewhere on this day, the practice prevailed of torturing some live bird. The college cook carried off a crow from its nest, and, fastening it to a pancake, hung it up on the school door, doubtless to serve as a target.” Then, again, there was the once famous and popular ram-hunt. “The college butcher had to provide a ram annually at election-tide, to be hunted and killed by the scholars,” the unfortunate animal being hamstrung and beaten to death in Weston’s Yard. Even in the nineteenth century such sports as bull-baiting, badger-baits, dog-fights, and cat and duck hunts, were “organised for the special edification of the Eton boys.” It is from these good old times that the present hare-hunt is a survival, and though it may now be conducted, as Dr. Warre has stated, in a legal and “sportsmanlike” manner, this certainly was not the case at a period no more remote than the headmastership of Dr. Balston (1857-1864), as we learn from Mr. Brinsley Richards’ well-known book, “Seven Years at Eton,” from which the following passage is quoted: “It is not pleasant to have to write that the Beagles were often made to hunt a miserable trapped fox which had lost one of its pads. Those who bought maimed foxes, as more convenient for beagles to hunt than strong, sound foxes, should have reflected that they might thereby tempt their purveyors to mutilate these animals. How could it be ascertained whether the fox supplied by a Brocas ‘cad’ had been maimed by accident or design? It was an exciting thing for jumping parties of Lower Boys, when out in the fields they saw the beagle-hunt pass them in full cry--first the fox, lolloping along as best he could, but contriving somehow to keep ahead of his pursuers; then the pack of about ten couples of short, long-eared, piebald, or liver-streaked hounds, all yelping; then the Master of the Hunt, with his short copper horn; the Whips, who cracked their hunting-crops and bawled admonition to the dogs with perhaps unnecessary vehemence; and lastly the Field of about fifty.” It is specially worthy of note, as bearing upon a later controversy, that Mr. Brinsley Richards states that “runs were far better when a man was sent out with a drag.” The drag is thus proved to have been in successful use at Eton almost as long ago as when the Beagles were first openly tolerated.