'Aha, the fox! and after him they ran; And eke with staves many another man. Ran Coll our dogge, and Talbot, and Gerlond, And Malkin with her distaff in her hond. Ran cow and calf, and eke the very hogges, So fered were for the barking of the dogges, And shouting of the men and women eke, They ronnen so, hem thought her hertes brake.' "At the next stage, no doubt, neighbouring farmers kept one or two hounds each; and, on stated days, met for the purpose of destroying a fox that had been doing damage to their poultry yards. By and bye, a few couple of strong hounds seem to have been kept by the small country esquires or yeomen who could afford the expense, and they joined packs. Such were called _trencher_ hounds, implying that they ran loose about the house, and were not confined in kennel." These are but short extracts, but they comprise the whole of what is said on the first origin of fox-hunting. The rest of the article treats of the quality and breed of horses and hounds. FREDERICK M. MIDDLETON. * * * * * WEATHER RULES. (Vol. viii., pp. 50. 535.) _St. Vincent's Day, Jan. 22._--In Brand's _Popular Antiquities_, Bohn's edition, vol. i. p. 38., is to be found the following notice of this day: "Mr. Douce's manuscript notes say: 'Vincenti festo si Sol radiet, memor esto;' thus Englished by Abraham Fleming: 'Remember on St Vincent's Day, If that the Sun his beams display.' "[Dr. Foster is at a loss to account for the origin of this command, &c.]" It is probable that the concluding part of the precept has been lost; but a curious old manuscript, which fell into my hands some years since, seems to supply the deficiency. The manuscript in question is a sort of household book, kept by a family of small landed proprietors in the island of Guernsey between the years 1505 and 1569. It contains memoranda, copies of wills, settlements of accounts, recipes, scraps of songs and parts of hymns and prayers; some Romanist, some Anglican, some of the Reformed Church in France. Among the scraps of poetry I find the following rhymes on St. Vincent's Day; the first three lines of which are evidently a translation of the Latin verse above quoted, the last containing the to be remembered: "Prens garde au jour St. Vincent, Car sy ce jour tu vois et sent Que le soleil soiet cler et biau, Nous erons du vin plus que d'eau." These lines follow immediately after the rhymed prognostications to be drawn from the state of the weather on St. Paul's Day, Jan. 28. As these {308} verses differ from those quoted in Brand, from an _Almanack_ printed at Basle in 1672, I here give the Guernsey copy: