"It is a good plan with young Spaniels to walk round a covert towards evening, when pheasants are out at feed in the stubbles, having an attendant with you to prevent them getting into covert, and walk in a zigzag way about the stubbles; you can generally give them plenty of practice in this way, and enter them well to the scent of winged game. If your puppies do not readily return to your whistle, but show a disposition to go on, turn your back upon them and go the other way, which will generally have the desired effect--and a rate or a crack of the whip from your attendant will greatly aid it. If a puppy is too fast, put up a fore-leg in his collar, or tie a strap tightly round one hind-leg just above the hock; but neither of these must remain long without changing, or you will produce swelling and inflammation. Apart from the pleasure and satisfaction there is in shooting to dogs of your own breaking, there is this advantage that they learn to understand your ways, and to know thoroughly your every look and motion, while you at the same time perfectly understand them.
"In selecting young Spaniels to break, if you do not breed your own, be most particular in getting them from a good working strain, of a sort that a friend of mine designates as 'savage for work.'
"To work Spaniels in thick, large woods, you should always go with them to work them, or send someone they are accustomed to work with, or they will become wild or slack."
At no period of English history has fox-hunting, with Horse and Hound, been more vigorously pursued than it is during the twentieth century.
Scattered from north to south, east to west, are approximately some two hundred packs of these magnificent specimens of the canine race.
Judging from the excellent sport enjoyed by the majority of hunts during this last season, one has no need to be sceptical as to the progress and continuance of this grand and manly form of sport. Looking back on the times when such great followers of the chase as Peter Beckford and Mr Apperley ("Nimrod"), one is apt to think that through lapse of time, agricultural depression, and inroads made into the country through commercial industry, fox-hunting might well-nigh have become a sport of the past, but, happily, this is not so.