Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Hounds were probably to meet at daybreak the following morning, and if at a distant fixture that might entail a couple of hours' riding in the dark, whilst even if it were not a hunting day those of our ancestors who lived in the country were early risers. Hunt balls and hunt dinners were more common a hundred years ago, and they were conducted on different lines from what they generally are in the present day. They had more of the family gathering about them. Any decent man in the Hunt was welcome to come and bring his wife and daughters to the ball; the price was within the means of almost any man who could hunt; an enjoyable evening was spent, and the old-fashioned Hunt ball was a factor which worked for the good of the Hunt. The same may be said of the Hunt dinner, which was by no means the formal and stiff affair which a public dinner generally is in these days. Perhaps it is impossible to revive the Hunt ball and Hunt dinner on the old lines ; perhaps it is undesirable to do so, even if it were possible ; but I must own to having a weak corner for them. They may belong to " those good customs " which, if persistently indulged in, " corrupt a world," but they were pretty phases of the country life which was so enjoyable when the first Duke of Cleveland hunted from Stocksfield-on- Tyne to Rufford in Nottinghamshire, and wakened the echoes with his horn, where Bedale, and Lord Zetland's, and York and Ainsty, and Bramham and the Badsworth, and other packs keep " the tambourine a-rowling," to use the words of James Pigg, from October to April. " The old order changeth," as I have said, butthere is one thing that does not change, and hearts are as true to sport, old hands are as wise, and young hands as keen as when the first Duke of Cleveland rode out from Raby with his ret...