he father, the grandfather, and great-grandfather of the
present huntsman.

In the time of the first Lord Yarborough, his country extended over the
whole of the South Wold country, part of the now Burton Hunt, and part
of North Nottinghamshire; and he used to go down into both those
districts for a month at a time to hunt the woodlands. There were, as he
told his grandson when he began hunting, only three or four fences
between Horncastle and Brigg, a distance of at least thirty miles.

Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt kept harriers at his Manor House of Aylsby, at the
foot of the Lincolnshire Wolds, before he turned them into fox-hounds. A
barn at Aylsby was formerly known as the "Kennels." The Aylsby estate
has passed, in the female line, into the Oxfordshire family of the
Tyrwhitt Drakes, who are so well known as masters of hounds, and
first-rate sportsmen; while a descendant of Squire Vyner, of
Lincolnshire, has, within the last twenty years, been a master of
fox-hounds in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Mr. Meynell, the father
of modern fox-hunting, and founder of the Quorn Hunt, formed his pack
chiefly of drafts from the Brocklesby.

Between the period that fox-hunting superseded hare-hunting in the
estimation of country squires, and that when the celebrated Mr. Meynell
reduced it to a science, and prepared the way for making hunting in
Leicestershire almost an aristocratic institution, a great change took
place in the breed of the hounds and horses, and in the style of
horsemanship. Under the old system, the hounds were taken out before
light to hunt back by his drag the fox who had been foraging all night,
and set on him as he lay above his stopped-earth, before he had digested
his meal of rats or rabbits. The breed of hounds partook more of the
long-eared, dew-lapped, heavy, crock-kneed southern hound, or of the
bloodhound. Well-bred horses, too, were less plentiful than they are
now.

But the change to fast hounds, fast horses, and fast men, took place at
a much more distant date than some of our hard-riding young swells of
1854 seem to imagine. A portrait of a celebrated hound, Ringwood, at
Brocklesby Park, painted by Stubbs, the well-known animal painter in
1792, presents in an extraordinary manner the type and character of some
of the best hounds remotely descended from him, although the Cheshire
song says:--

"When each horse wore a crupper, each squire a pigtail,
Ere Blue Cap and Wanton taught greyhound