and either personally, or by writing, arrange
with them to walk puppies, so that they may be prepared to receive their
young charges. Also, the Master or Secretary should visit the puppies at
walk occasionally, as such practical interest taken in their welfare,
would tend to encourage the walker in her by no means easy task of
rearing the youngsters.

Mr. Otho Paget's advice as to prize giving and a sumptuous lunch hardly,
I think, meets the requirements of the case. We can dismiss the lunch,
as very few of my sex care for "smart and festive" feeding, and as far
as the prizes go for their trouble and expense with the animals, what is
the use of judging puppies six months after they have returned from
walk? The poor, neglected, half-starved animal who goes back to kennels
all skin and bone may, if he be a well-shaped hound, show up better at
the time of judging, than those who were returned full of good food and
in hard exercise, but who may have lost in condition by fretting, or by
having to live on shorter rations than before. Some puppies, as I know
from experience, have either died during the six months' interval, or
have been drafted to another pack. Therefore it would be far more
satisfactory and encouraging to puppy walkers for the judging to be on a
day fixed for them to take their young charges to the kennels. In bygone
days when country squires lived on their land and their tenants were
under contract to walk puppies, the present arrangement no doubt
answered well enough, because it was to the tenant's interest to do his
best to please his landlord; but times have changed since then. The
large majority of people who hunt nowadays, rent hunting boxes for the
season, and take so little interest in country life that they fly off to
town on the first appearance of frost, and are not seen again until the
land is fit to be ridden over. When the season ends, they disappear till
the following one. Few of them know any of the resident farmers or
inhabitants of hunting centres even by sight, or want to know them. This
snobbish exclusiveness is very harmful to the interests of hunting,
because the farmers are under no obligation to them--quite the
reverse--and a farmer can, if he likes, refuse to allow them to ride
over his land. Therefore, when hunting people show farmers no civility,
the agriculturists naturally do not care to go to the trouble and
expense of walking hunt puppies, as several farmers have told me, unless