The writer of the following spirited article, has been a frequent contributor to The Country, and well known as a judge at many of our most important shows, and that he is equally at home and happy in the field as in the ring no reader of his article on the Foxhound can doubt. "Vert" says:

"Our Saxon forefathers hunted down the fox not so much for sport as to protect their slender stock of poultry, lambs, and sucking pigs from 'the subtle, pilfering foe, prowling around in midnight shades,' and were wont to proclaim his mort-note in joyous blasts from the sonorous throat of the cowhorn; and we do not suppose that they would be very particular as to the kind of hound they employed for their purpose.

"Who ever asks where, or when, or how, the wily fox is ta'en " until victorious William and his son Rufus taught them with horn and voice to cheer and discipline the pack? For centuries the chase was reserved for royalty and the nobles of the land; and it was not until "our George was king" that the middle classes were allowed to join in the sport, when the yeomen and farmers in various parts of England got up packs of hounds for hunting the fox, each giving bed and board to one or more couples, which they brought together on appointed hunting days. These were called trencher packs, from the manner in which they were billeted out on the members of the clubs. Several such packs are still kept in the northern counties, and afford their supporters plenty of sport.

The first pack of foxhounds, with huntsman and whippers-in on horseback, was established about the middle of the last century in Dorsetshire, and hunted the Cranbourne Chase country for several years, when they were purchased by Mr. George Bowes, grandfather of the present Mr. John Bowes, of Streatlem Castle, after which they hunted the Durham country, and initiated northern foxhunters into the proper way of following the sport.

The Brocklesby Hound list, which is one of the earliest, dates from 1786, the first sire recorded being Dover, by Fitzwilliam's Rumager.

Mr. Farquharson hunted Dorsetshire from 1806 to 1858, fifty-two seasons, and had ninety couples of honnds in his kennels. He bred his bitches to about 21in., and his dog hounds to 23in. high, and they brought thirteen hundred and forty-seven brace of foxes to book in twenty-one seasons. In the season 1842-1843 the nose tally of this kennel was eighty-seven brace.

Mr. Meynell, who hunted the Quorn for twenty-four seasons, did not care to have them under 24in., and Mr. Assheton Smith, who succeeded him, raised the standard to 25in. Of the old masters, the Duke of Grafton, Lord Lonsdale, and Mr. Warde liked to have them very little under 26in.

Mr. Hall, the present master of the Holderness, has hunted that country for thirty-five seasons without intermission, having won his first spurs on the grey-tail Screveton, with Mr. Digby Legard, in 1820, and has since learnt the "hang" of every field from Sledmere plantation to Lammas stream, of which local tradition avers that, by sounding the depth of that dainty-looking water trap, Mr. "Nimrod" Apperley had the freedom of Holderness conferred on him, and that he carried away a luckless Lammas minnow in his boot as his precept of initiation. Mr. Hall cares more for the working qualities of his hounds than an inch or so in height; and, besides his doings at home with the Holderness, he has also carried his banner to the fore amongst the crack riders, and at all the crack meets in the shires, from Lord Yarborough's at Cainby Corner and the Quorn at Rolleston to Lord Chesterfield's at Bullock Smithy.

In January of 1836, a knot of twenty-one second horses, by a lucky nick-in, gained the rising ground and caught a head view of the Belvoir bitch pack pressing hard on a Piper Hole fox up the vale, near the close of a fast forty-eight minutes; the first flight being reduced to seven horsemen, with Tom Goosey at the fag end.

"Lord Forrester is leading them, on the grey," says Tom Chambers, alluding to a grey holding a centre lead of a good twenty lengths. Mentally, we had already claimed the grey as one of the Yorkshire contingent; and, biding our time, as he led down the swede ridges, and closely scanning his charge at the ox-fence - too stiff to bend and too tough to break - we caught the certainty, and broke out: "It's the Lord of Holderness that's on the grey, my lads; and all the lords in Leicestershire can't catch him!" Nor could they! And when the fox was pulled down, two fields ahead, there were only three claimants up for the twenty-one fresh horses at hand, the noble lord above alluded to not being one of them. Will. Goodall was second whip on that day; and when he took the horn in 1842 he reduced the Belvoir standard from twenty-four to twenty-three inches, and in the season of 1854 he killed one hundred and ten foxes in one hundred and twelve days.

"We don't call foxhounds dogs" was the crusty retort of Tom Parrington, the Yorkshire secretary to a Craven scut-hunter, on the eve of the Skipton hound show. But, with all due deference to the cherished reservation of the mighty mentor, we not only call the foxhound a dog, but the dog of dogs, and premise that, from a national point of view, foxhounds are of more importance than all other breeds of dogs clubbed together.

We have weekly records of hunting appointments, from 167 packs of foxhounds in Great Britain and Ireland, which collectively engage to hunt about five hundred and forty days a week, besides which we are cognisant of several other established packs of foxhounds not included in the lists, and probably six hundred hunting days a week would be nearer the mark, and this goes on ('weather permitting') for nearly-half the year.

"It is a clearly ascertained fact that a country cannot be properly hunted three days a week for less than £3000 a year, or four days a week for less than £4000 a year, and if we make this a basis for calculation, we have as an approximate no less a sum than £600,000 a year spent on foxhunting establishments alone, to say nothing of the enormous sums spent on the private studs of those for whom the sport is provided, nearly every shilling of which is not only spent at home, but on home products, and filters through every branch of the home trade.