Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Transcriber’s Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. THE LIFE OF A FOX [Illustration: HUNTSMAN AND HOUNDS. BY J. A. WHEELER. _Lent by Basil Dighton_.] THE LIFE OF A FOX WRITTEN BY HIMSELF BY THOMAS SMITH, ESQ. Late Master of the Craven Hounds, and at present of the Pytchley, Northamptonshire A NEW EDITION WITH COLOURED PLATES AFTER H. ALKEN AND OTHERS AND AN INTRODUCTION BY LORD WILLOUGHBY DE BROKE LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 1920 [All Rights Reserved] INTRODUCTION BY LORD WILLOUGHBY DE BROKE No Master of Foxhounds, alive or dead, has a greater right to be heard than Mr. Thomas Smith. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” and though it is not altogether true that the proof of the ability to show sport is the number of Foxes’ noses on the kennel door, the fact that Mr. Smith killed ninety Foxes in ninety-one days’ hunting in a Country which has no great reputation as a scenting country, is a piece of evidence in favour of his knowledge of woodcraft, and of his skill in applying it, which cannot be gainsaid, the more particularly when we take into account the epoch during which this remarkable feat was achieved. It is true that Mr. Smith hunted Hounds when the modern system of getting away close behind the Fox, and trying to burst him, had superseded the system that prevailed before 1750 of dragging up to the Fox and trying to hunt him down at the end of a long chase with Hounds that would have been beaten for pace in the first mile by those of Mr. Osbaldiston and Mr. Smith. But much of the contemporary evidence goes to show that Foxes were wilder in Mr. Smith’s time in the sense that they probably had to travel long distances for their food, as there were fewer small coverts than exist to-day. Consequently there were fewer Foxes. It is true that these conditions were favourable to the Hounds in that their chance of changing Foxes was diminished. On the other hand the multiplication of small Fox coverts with artificial earths that has proceeded in the last fifty years makes the killing of a lot of Foxes, especially during the Cub-hunting, an easier matter than in the days of Mr. Thomas Smith. If the artificial earth is securely stopped late at night, and skilfully opened at the right moment in a morning’s Cub-hunting, when the Cubs are beginning to wonder what to do, they are sure to creep into the earth, and the eating of one or more of them is reduced to a certainty. For this reason the counting of noses is not in these days a supreme test of the