J. J.

440

FARQUHAR SON,

ESQ.

ENGRAVED BY J. B. HUNT, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.

This Meynell of the West first saw the light on October 9th, 1784. Oxford claimed him in due course, and, with Sportsman and Reading (who were succeeded by Northampton and Muggy) as his first-saddle allies, he passed his undergraduate days pleasantly enough, beneath the sound of "Mighty Tom" of Christ Church. Jim Treadwell was but a lad of six, playing about with his younger brother Charles, among the hedgerows of the pleasant Oxfordshire village of Stoke Talmage, when his future master flung aside his Herodotus for his Somerville, and commenced at two-and-twenty, with a goodly band of white-collars, as huntsman to his own pack. These he bought originally from Mr. Wyndham, of Dinton, and a clever pack they were, the bitches being about 21 inches, and the dog-hounds 23. At the end of the first season, Wood, who came with them as kennel huntsman, was succeeded by Ben Jennings, from Mr. Collyer's, in Essex; and on the 18th of April, 1837, Ben, after thirty years of faithful service, resigned the horn to Jim Treadwell, and retired with a silver cup, an arm-chair, and a purse of £250 from the county, and a pension from Mr. Farquharson, to his cottage at Tarrant Heaton, where he died. Sol Baker, the whip, was alike honoured; and Ben Foote, who was with Mr. Farquharson as valet and groom all the time he was at Oxford, and served for nine seasons with him afterwards as second whip, left for Sir Thomas Mostýn's country, and ultimately rose to be huntsman there in Mr. Drake's day. Mr. Farquharson's kennel blood was strengthened, by large purchases from the Duke of Bridgwater and Lord Petre; and of late years he has had a great many drafts from Mr. Assheton Smith's and other kennels, as he seldom entered more than eight or nine couple of his own breeding. The style of Mr. Wyndham's hounds continued unaltered for many seasons, except that the bitches' standard was raised an inch; and it was not till much later that "The Squire's" eye loved to rest upon some fiveand-twenty-inch favourites on the flags. Since then he has kept a large and a small pack...

Unlike many sportsmen, he did not commence with harriers, or a three or four-days-a-week pack, but boldly flung himself at once into the fox-hunting breach, and hunted, at his own expense, all Dorsetshire and part of Somersetshire six days a-week from the very outset, with thirty horses, two kennels, and ninety couple of hounds. Cranbourne Chase, with its short oaks and hazel trees, was then, as it is now (though it was rather short last season), the great nursery of Dorsetshire foxes; but its yellow-breasted martens, to whose memory English historians still continue to cling, as the latest relics of the vermin of feudal times, have all but disappeared, along with the badgers in Wychwood Forest.

A sad foe to them was the noted Parson Butler and his half-sheared terrier Hempy, who were so long the welcome attendants at the Dorsetshire cover-side, and went with Mr. Farquharson through many a day that ought to be written in letters of gold in the scarlet annals of the century. Hempy was never beaten by a fox but once-on the day when Ben Foote, then a mere boy, was run away with by Traveller (who had been purchased out of a light coach) in a rare five-and-forty-minute thing from Frampton to Cerne. The fox got into a hole under some stairs; and Stormer, the best hound in the pack, and Hempy wholly failed to draw him between them.

In addition to his extensive agricultural pursuits, among which sheep breeding is not the least, Mr. Farquharson has always been an enthusiastic hunter-breeder, and his colours were once perpetually seen in front at the county races. Forty years ago, his horse, "Black-and-allBlack," was a perfect hero of romance in Dorsetshire, and his prowess is spoken of there to this day, as Matchem's is in Yorkshire, or Lanercost's in Cumberland. The Hobgoblin strain, which goes through Annette back to Phantom, has been his choicest blood of late years, and it has crossed especially well with that of an Elis mare, who died about two years since, leaving two rare chesnuts-one of them Will-o'-the-Wispas her legacy to the stud. It is upon The Pony, who is by Cadiz, by Ebor, and as tender as a lover with hounds, that Treadwell will go down to posterity in Grant's picture; while his good master selected Botanist to honour. This wonderful brown animal has done Treadwell immense service, and was ridden by him no less than forty times in the 1856-57 season, and carried him as bravely as ever, after eight or nine seasons, to the final close. Popelan, Grey Murphy, and Grey Lottery have also been well-known names in the Langton stables, which at one time were principally replenished by Mr. Anderson, the horse-dealer, and then of Grays Inn Lane.

It was no small sorrow to the white-collars and farmers of Dorsetshire that "The Squire" should have been prevented, by a severe horse kick, from hunting with them the last five weeks of the season; and until he "pronounced the words of doom" at the farewell festival in February, they clung to the hope that the parting was not to be. We care not to dwell on this sad wrench and its causes. There have been heart-burnings enough: and the division of the country between two packs has indeed been purchased at a bitter price. Dorsetshire has not, however, failed to show its gratitude. In 1827 it presented its Squire, at a cost of 1,150 guineas, with a vase and shield, as a meet acknowledgment of his hunting chivalry; and thirty years later it celebrated his hunting jubilee, by the presentation of two candelabra in the renaissance style. The picture, to which the greater portion of the £1800 then collected was devoted, was not finished till many months after, and then it merely came to grace the sad banquet at which its donee pronounced his farewell. Jim Treadwell, too, was not forgotten; and once more did the gentry and yeomanry assemble at dinner at Blandford, bearing a cup, a purse, and a horn, to give a parting handshake and view-halloo to one of the most faithful servants that ever spoke to hound. Jim has run into about thirteen hundred and eighty brace of foxes in his twenty-one seasons, and eighty-seven brace of them must be credited to him in 1842-43. The last scene at the Eastbury

kennels is still to come, and seventy-five couple of hounds, and thirty or forty hunters and young stock, are to be dispersed on June 9th, among the hunting fields of England, by the ruthless tap of Mr. Edmund Tattersall's hammer The cry of other packs will be heard in Coker Wood and Badbury Rings; but still, long after the present century is numbered with the past, a pleasant tradition will linger round Dorsetshire firesides of how a former squire of Langton took to hounds when a mere college stripling, and how even his fifty-second and last season found him with a heart as young and a cheer as shrill as ever.

THE

ALPENSTOCK;

OR, GLACIAL TOILS AND SUNNY RAMBLES.

BY CAPTAIN J. W. CLAYTON,

(Late of the 13th Light Dragoons: Author of " Ubique.")

[COMMUNICATED TO, AND EDITED BY, LORD WILLIAM LENNOX.]

CHAPTER IV.

The guide having finished his cheerful story, our party proceeded onwards, and arrived in the evening at Chamounix, which we found in a state of ferment, on account of the séjour there of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. The whole place was (as it always is, in the autumn) undergoing a wonderful state of confusion and excitement.

One of our day's walks included the ascent of the Flegère, the traversing the Mer-de-Glace, and the arrival at the Montanvert ; ending with the descent from thence into Chamounix. On the summit of the Flegère we found, unrolled before us, a panorama of nearly the whole chain of Mont Blanc, with its eternal crest crowned with a diadem of snow, and surrounded by its attendant clusters of aiguilles and peaks springing haughtily to the heavens, as if proudly conscious that the tread of human footsteps can never desecrate their brows. We descended rapidly the sides of the Flegère, crossed the valley, and, mounting the opposite ascent, commenced the passage of the Mer-deGlace from the chapeau, a small chalet on the summit of a rock overhanging the frozen sea. So away we started, slipping and scrambling over the solid waves, and stepping across the yawning chasms and rifts in the ice, into which a false step has before now launched many a wanderer to the blackness of the unknown depths below,

The view from the Montanvert comprises nearly the whole mass of the Mer-de-Glace; and when the bright moon rolls out from behind the dark outline of some gigantic peak, and showers down on those silent billows of ice its paling flood of light, the scene is of indescribable sublimity.