Four o’clock on a hunting morning usually found him preparing the inner man with a breakfast of underdone beef, with eggs beaten up in brandy to fill the interstices; and thus fortified he was ready for a fifty miles run. He was what Nimrod would have called, “a good rough rider” over the stiff Shropshire clays, and he generally managed to keep up with the best to the last;
“Nicking and craning he deemed a crime, And nobody rode harder perhaps in his time.”
He could scarcely “Top a flight of rails,” “Skim ridge and furrow,” or, charge a fence, however, with Phœbe Higgs, who sometimes accompanied him.
Phœbe, who was a complete Diana, and would take hazardous leaps, beckoning Mr. Forester to follow her extraordinary feats, led the Squire to wager heavy sums that in leaping she would beat any woman in England. With Phœbe and Moody, and a few choice spirits of the same stamp on a scent, there was no telling to what point between the two extremities of the Severn it might carry them. They might turn-up some few miles from its source or its estuary, and not be heard of at Willey for a week. One long persevering run into Radnorshire, in which a few plucky riders continued the pace for some distance and then left the field to the Squire and Moody, with one or two others, who kept the heads of their favourites in the direction Reynard was leading, passed into a tradition; but the brush appears not to have been fairly won, a gamekeeper having sent a shot through the leg of the “varmint” as he saw him taking shelter in a churchyard—an event commemorated in some doggrel lines still current.
Very romantic tales are told of long runs by a superannuated servant of the Foresters, old Simkiss, who had them from his father; but we forbear troubling the reader with more than an outline of one of these, that of Old Tinker. Old Tinker was the name of a fox, with more than the usual cunning of his species, that had often proved more than a match for the hounds; and one morning the Squire, having made up his mind for a run, repaired to Tickwood, where this fox was put up. On hearing the dogs in full cry the Squire vowed he would “Follow the devil this time to hell’s doors but he would catch him.” Reynard, it appears, went off in the direction of the Clee Hills; but took a turn, and made for Thatcher’s Coppice; from there to the Titterstone Hill, and then back to Tickwood, where the hounds again ousted him, and over the same ground again. On arriving at the Brown Clee Hills the huntsman’s horse was so blown that he took Moody’s, sending Tom with his own to the nearest inn to get spiced ale and a feed. By this time the fox was on his way back, and the horse on which Tom was seated no sooner heard the horn sounding than he dashed away and joined in the chase. Ten couples of fresh hounds were now set loose at the kennels in Willey Hollow, and these again turned the fox in the direction of Aldenham, but all besides Moody were now far behind, and his horse fell dead beneath him. The dogs, too, had had enough; they refused to go further, and Old Tinker once more beat his pursuers, but only to die in a drain on the Aldenham estate, where he was found a week afterwards.