Col. Apperley says: “With our forefathers, when the roost-cock sounded his clarion, they sounded their horn, throwing off the pack so soon as they could distinguish a stile from a gate, or, in other words, so soon as they could see to ride to the hounds. Then it was that the hare was hunted to her form by the trail, and the fox to his kennel by the drag. Slow as this system would be deemed, it was a grand treat to the real sportsman. What, in the language of the chase, is called the ‘tender-nosed hound,’ had an opportunity of displaying itself to the inexpressible delight of his master; and to the field—that is, to the sportsmen who joined in the diversion—the pleasures of the day were enhanced by the moments of anticipation produced by the drag. As the scent grew warmer, the certainty of finding was confirmed; the music of the pack increased; and the game being up, away went the hounds in a crash. Both trail and drag are at present but little thought of. Hounds merely draw over ground most likely to hold the game they are in quest of, and thus, in a great measure, rely upon chance for coming across it; for if a challenge be heard, it can only be inferred that a fox has been on foot in the night—the scent being seldom sufficient to carry the hounds up to his kennel. Advantages, however, as far as sport is concerned, attend the present hour of meeting in the field, independently of the misery of riding many miles in the dark, which sportsmen in the early part of the last century were obliged to do. The game, when it is now aroused, is in a better state to encounter the great speed of modern hounds; having had time to digest the food it has partaken of in the night previous to its being stirred. But it is only since the great increase of hares and foxes that the aid of the trail and drag could be dispensed with without the frequent recurrence of blank days, which now seldom happen. Compared with the luxurious ease with which the modern sportsman is conveyed to the field—either lolling in his chaise and four, or galloping along at the rate of twenty miles an hour on a hundred-guinea hack—the situation of his predecessor was all but distressing. In proportion to the distance he had to ride by starlight were his hours of rest broken in upon, and exclusive of the time that operation might consume another serious one was to be provided for—this was the filling his hair with powder and pomatum until it could hold no more, and forming it into a well-formed knot, or club, as it was called, by his valet, which cost commonly a good hour’s work. The protecting mud boots, the cantering hack, the second horse in the field, were luxuries unknown to him. His well-soiled buckskins, and brown-topped boots, would have cut an indifferent figure in the presence of a modern connoisseur by a Leicestershire cover side.” “Notwithstanding all this, however,” he adds, “we are inclined strongly to suspect that, out of a given number of