INTRODUCTION When time, which steals our hours away, Shall steal our pleasures too, The memory of the past shall stay And half our joys renew. Moore from earliest childhood I was brought up among horses. My parents had hunted all their lives-indeed, my mother was almost obsessed by her love of fox-hunting and in her day could hold her own across country with any woman or man. My father drove a four-in-hand in summer, my mother often handling the reins, and it was a case of horses and everything connected with them-and hunting in particular-being part of ones daily life. Stories of great hunts and people famous in the hunting world, together with the names of celebrated hounds, penetrated my brain when I was almost too young to realise the fact. I did realise, however, even as a small child, that I came of fox-hunting stock, which included a gr eat-grandfather who continued to ride hard to hounds till he was seventy, averaging four days a week It was not surprising, considering all things, that I grew up with an almost fanatical love of the chase. My first introduction to a pack of hounds was at the age of two and a half, but I cannot say that I remember it My parents were spending part of the winter in Cheshire, hunting with the South Cheshire and Sir W. W. Wynns, and being short of a horse to ride, my mother went out one day in the pony cart, taking me with her. It happened that hounds hunted a fox alongside the lane in which we were driving and it is related that I struggled to my feet on the seat of the trap screaming, Get to em, get to ern. Shortly afterwards, hounds killed their fox close to the same road and so I was told in later years I insisted on staggering to the scene of action still exclaiming, Get to em...