meeting in charge of an amateur, as, no matter how capable a man may be with dogs in the matter of training and feeding, if he is a country bumpkin he is sure to meet someone at the coursing meeting who will take him in. He may get through a one-day meeting, at which he arrives in the morning, all right; but if it is a two days' affair, and he has to stop in the town, the hour of his trouble is sure to come.
It happened about fifteen years ago that the squire just referred to and I owned a few greyhounds in partnership, and had some small measure of success at the little local one-day fixtures. This aroused our ambition, and we entered a brace of puppies in a thirty-two dog stake at an important meeting held in the North Riding of Yorkshire. I will not localise the place, but may say that my friend and I took up our quarters at Harrogate, the dogs being sent to the scene of action in charge of the squire's gamekeeper, who, though a good man, and a brave one, too, in his place, was (so he found out afterwards) quite out of place so far away from home. On the morning of the first day's coursing man and dogs met us at the railway station nearest to the ground, and it did not take us long to find out that all was well with the puppies. In fact their custodian told us he had gone to bed at eight o'clock, with both dogs in his room.
