huntsman, was bitten in the hand, while administering a ball to one after she had become attacked, but a timely application of the knife, and lunar caustic, effectually prevented any fatal consequences. As to the cure-I do not believe that any faith whatever can be placed in any remedy excepting the knife and caustic, by a timely application of which, the progress of the malady may be safely arrested previous to the second circulation taking place through the absorbents, and which is necessary to enable the virus to produce "confirmed rabies." The second instance which I have to record, is the destruction of part of Mr. Hall's hounds, which hunted Somersetshire. The malady was traced to a terrier which belonged to the pack, and which had been bitten by a wild-looking setter dog, during one of the hunting days. The hounds were divided into a large and a small pack, and it was the large pack which were out on this unfortunate day; amongst this lot, every single hound either died raving mad, or was destroyed upon suspicion of having been bitten; but in the small pack, not one single instance of rabies occurred. During the same year, but rather later in the season, Mr. H. Combe's hounds, which had formerly been so celebrated when the property of that excellent sportsman, Mr. Osbaldeston, were taken into Lincolnshire, to "hunt the April month" in Sir R. Sutton's woodlands. They travelled by water from London, and while waiting at one of the wharfs before embarking, a cur dog was observed by W. Gardner, the boiler, who was one of the persons attendant upon the hounds, to wrangle with them, and bite several of them. No particular notice was taken at the time, it being looked upon as an incident frequently occurring to hounds when travelling. However, within about three weeks of the time, several couples of them died mad; the rest were only saved by separating them.

I will relate one more instance of hounds going mad in the kennel, from being bitten, before I close these few observations. I received the account from that well-known old sportsman, Major Blagrave, who was master of a pack of harriers for many years. In the year 1806, the major resided at Ashdown Park, in Berkshire, and was at that time in possession of a very clever pack of harriers. Upon the puppies coming up from their quarters in the spring, he was informed that one of them had been bitten by a dog supposed to be mad, which had been roving about the neighbourhood, and he was advised to keep an eye upon him. However, after the dog had been shut up some weeks, and no symptoms of madness being evinced, he was placed in the kennel with the other hounds, where all went on well for some days. In the course of a short time this suspected puppy was observed to have a most extraordinary propensity for fondling upon and biting at, in a playful manner, not only the other hounds, but also his master and the feeder. He was immediately condemned, and, being placed in confinement by himself, died in a few days raving mad. The whole

*William Smith, huntsman to the Earl of Yarborough, has the credit of possessing a recipe which is a certain cure for the malady, and which has been handed down from father to son for several generations. Whether it is infallible or not I cannot pretend to say; but it is a well known fact that it has been frequently used with supposed success; and amongst other patients who have availed themselves of it, we may mention Jem Shirley, the present huntsman to Sir J. Cope, who was bitten by a mad dog some years since in Ireland.

pack were shortly afterwards destroyed, some in a most confirmed state of rabies, and the rest were put away to prevent the possibility of their propagating the malady.

I will conclude by declaring that I have never known a dog to be really hydrophobous, where the disease had not been proved to have been introduced from inoculation from a bite alone; nor do I believe that any other person can adduce one single instance to the contrary. Dogs may be known to suffer under extreme feverish excitement, approaching to madness, from constipation, the effects of distemper, or from other causes. They may also be afflicted with bronchitis, or with a violent inflammation of the fauces, the symptoms of which I know, by mine own experience, greatly to resemble rabies; but to one who is well acquainted with both diseases, they are as different as light from darkness.

FOXHOUNDS AND HARRIERS.

BY WILL WHOOP.

As a general principle, foxhounds and harriers are the tories and radicals of the hunting world; you cannot show one party favour, without incurring the resentment of the other: there is no via media here for Phaeton to choose, here no conservatives are recognized: the political spirit of the Guelphs and Ghibelines was never more distinct, than is that of these unbrotherly sons of Nimrod; and two parallel lines will be found to intersect each other, ere they be found to work together in good feeling and fellowship. There are certainly some few exceptions, and they are solely attributable to a mutual high sense of honour, and a strict observance of the rules of hunting between these opposite parties when brought into collision.

Though I would rather look a foxhound in the face than any other animal in the brute creation, yet have I heard and still hope to hear many a merry peal from the " tuneful choir:" being no partisan, I enjoy my sport with either party, as I would my broiled bone and song at Evans's, cheek by jowl with peer or pickpocket. What the bat is to the brute and feathered race, I am to the two parties; unattached generally, but when on service a sort of marine, and willing to do my duty; neither Tractarian nor Nonconformist, but a very decent Protestant.

Undoubtedly there are neutral grounds for this absence of congeniality; each has his grievances to complain of, and each holds the other to be the aggressor. The uncompromising foxhunter is often heard to address the field in the following terms:-" What is that fellow Tom about now, drawing that cover? He knows as well as I do that those infernal harriers ran through it yesterday, and he may as well draw for a kangaroo as a fox;" and to the first whip, "Jack, get those hounds out of cover; why, they hang about it like a set of

towling harriers feathering round a cow-dab." Should a stranger appear who happens not to be in pink or a hunt livery, some aristocratic fop whispers to his next neighbour that in all probability he is "some d-d harrier man."

On the other side, the harehunter views the foxhunter as a despot, who shouts like H. B.'s Duke of Wellington, "No surrender." The hellhounds in Theodore and Honoria would not be crossed with more dread than the foxhounds in chase by the harriers: the harehunter has a rooted aversion to the conventional rights of the foxhunter as to country, and envies his supposed non-liability, while in pursuit of his game, to actions at law. Bye the bye, there is a case which was decided by Lord Ellenborough, that is calculated to astonish all foxhunters; and not being very well known, I will quote it for their benefit:-"The judgment of Lord Ellenborough in the case of the Earl of Essex, v. Capel, in which he held that if the defendant pursued the fox merely for the pleasure of the chase, and not for the sole purpose of killing and destroying a noxious animal: in short, if the good of the public was not bonâ fide his governing motive, that he was liable to an action of trespass for following the hounds in pursuit of it over the plaintiff's lands."-Deacon on the Game Law, ch. 3.

The legitimate sportsman will of course infer that his lordship's seat in the saddle was not as imposing as that on the bench; he will infer too, and justly, that the "high court of Diana" is not to be found in the precincts of Lincoln's-Inn-Fields. The harehunter, however, must not gather from this judgment of my Lord Ellenborough's, that he would be justified in worriting that noble animal the fox with a cry of tow-wows within a summer's day ride of a pack of foxhounds, on the pretext that he is no preserver of foxes, does not " put them down," and runs them as noxious animals solely for the good of the public. No," Ne sutor ultra crepitam;" let him stick to his jellies, and I'll stick to him. The foxhound for the fox, and the harrier for the hare, all the world over.

In the days of my youth, a sportsman of great skill and experience, and not to "fame unknown”. -a man who was all but littered in a kennel, and actually bred there-used to warn me against the fast and loose system of running hares with thoroughbred foxhounds, which he said never could be productive of sport, though it prevailed here and there in humble mimicry of the noble science. For," said he, "I would not keep a jackass in condition to hunt with that gentleman commoner's pack: that beautiful passage in Somerville which describes the finding a hare by the night-walk, the musical prelude, is lost to such a man; he values the see-ho alone, and the first dry road or greasy fallow throws up the heads of his hounds in hopeless misery; or, if the scent serve and the country be favourable, they carry head so ambitiously as to overrun all traces of where it was last given, or last owned: the forte of the foxhound is to flash forward, it is the dash that distinguishes him;' the hare, on the other hand, stops short, doubles back, runs her foil, or squats. No, my boy, they are a mute lot, where silence is not an object; they seldom kill; and when they do, it's always for themselves: tear him and eat him, lads ;' the foxhound for the fox, and the harrier for the hare, all the world over; mind that, Will." W. W.

THE POACHER'S PEAN.

BY AN OXONIAN.

Poaching, no doubt, both in itself and its consequences, is a very sad offence, for it tends more or less to spoil-

"To spoil, sir, that manly, invigorating, and exciting amusement, battue shooting-to spoil a sport so entirely free from selfish or interested motives; a sport that, in its practice, binds still closer the lords of men and manors with those intelligent and independent set of gentlemen, who speak when they are spoken to, do as they are bid,' vote the right way, and hurrah at the right place."

For it tends, as we were saying, more or less to spoil

"That good understanding which should ever exist between landlord and tenant, tenant and peasant, peasant and pheasant; that feeling of mutual confidence between those born to till the land, and those bred to feed on the fat of it; and to weaken that fine old English maxim, which declares that the heirs and the hares, as the indefatigable Hibernian ventured to intimate in his second epistle to Miss Coutts, 66 were made for each other."

Once more, we repeat, poaching tends to spoil

"The reliance on regular wages, the sweet rewards of honest industry, and the mens conscia recti of earning five shillings a week and living on it; while, on the other hand, it encourages the breed of beershops, shifty scamps, and shepherds' dogs."

There, now, in the face of all orders, rules and precedents, have we suffered those three gentlemen-the enthusiastic sportsman, the philanthropist, and the political economist, to take the very word out of our mouth; and yet, were there ever such far-fetched erroneous impressions, such party pleadings, or such wilful perversions! Why, here is a man at our elbow, a real practical man, one Mr. Worley, a crack correspondent of the Times newspaper, who strikes right at the heart of the offence, and adds an equally able remedy. Hark to Worley!

"There, my dear sir; you must know as well as I do, that's all stuff and nonsense those fellows have been talking about, or at any rate of but secondary importance: Attend to me now. The grand objection to poaching is, that it spoils-hang that hollow jargon about sport, good feeling, and honest industry-it spoils the sale of game: nothing more nor less; and here's the plan to put a stop to it: let no magistrate or magistrates give a tradesman a licence to sell game, without his then and there agreeing to buy all he requires of that magistrate himself, or some other brother on the bench."

That, and that only, in the opinion of Worley, Esq., of some place in Buckinghamshire or Hertfordshire, should be the law of the land; and yet, if we recollect right, some confounded foreigner had the impudence to call us a "nation of shopkeepers!" "Want a licence do you, Stephens ?"

"If you please, your worship."

"Hem-well-what do you say to me and my friend Fitzfiggins

C C

here? we'll supply you as well and as cheap as any house in the county-an immense stock always on hand, orders executed with punctuality and despatch, and a liberal allowance made to those who take a quantity."

While, of course, every "stately home in England" would sport a board over the grand entry to this effect:

:

"THE TRADE SUPPLIED."

But Mr. Worley, after all, is merely mortal man, and only one among the many ready with advice gratis, a few of whose opinions we shall take the liberty of collating for the benefit and edification of the newly-appointed committee.

In the first place, then, we have Mr. Bright, who, according to his own account, "being no sportsman, and knowing nothing of rural life," must, in a parliamentary sense, be peculiarly qualified for taking the lead in any inquiry of this sort. Friend Bright so remarkable for his mild manners and measures in and out of the house, who sums up to the effect, that this dreadful crime of poaching, with its concomitant disadvantages, can only be suppressed by the total abolishment of corn laws, game laws, and country gentlemen.

Next on the list we have Mr. Grantley Berkeley, all for striking remedies that must come home to the feelings of every one; an honourable gentleman who seasons a great deal of sound sense with some little personal prowess, and no little personal vanity, and who winds up his orations with just the least touch of the brogue: "By the powers, then, Mr. Spaker, sure the way to keep such chaps paceful and quiet is to have a rig'lar row with every mother's son of 'em you clap eyes on!"

As number three, we call up Mr. Coroner Wakley; and here we would especially direct the reader's attention to the grand and selfsame object he and Mr. Berkeley are for obtaining, while the ways by which they would strive to arrive at it could scarcely be more adverse to each other.

"Whenever I fell in with a poacher," says the latter, "I always made it an invariable rule to fall out with him by giving him-a punch on the head."

"Now," says the learned member for Finsbury," whenever I fell in with a poacher, I always kept in with him by giving him—a leg of mutton."

And here we repeat from these apparently "strange contradictions" we hold under our thumb and finger the grand secret for the senators to work upon-no matter whether he have it in hard blows or hard meat, the only effectual plan for bringing a poacher caught in the fact to his senses is to give him

"In charge," says the rural police.

"Six months imprisonment" says the senior magistrate.

"With hard labour," adds the parish overseer.

"The rights of man, by doing away with rights of trespass,

says Fergus O'Connor.

"Leave to go away this time, and he'll never do so no more," says the unhappy wretch himself.

By giving him

"A BELLYFUL" shout Messrs. Berkeley and Wakley-a bellyful,