by an experienced trainer, trying them before they run in public, entering them for stakes, and undergoing—to a certain extent—all the anxieties and worries which are inseparable from the conduct of a public kennel.
Before treating of public coursing, which is far more largely pursued than the older branch of the sport, I will say something about private coursing, once among the most popular of all country sports, but now almost fallen into decay, and followed only in remote districts where the march of the times has not been very pronounced.
In the last century, when fox-hunting (or indeed any hunting by scent) was comparatively little known, and only practised in some few favoured parts of the country (I think there were not twenty packs of foxhounds in existence at the beginning of the present century), coursing the hare with greyhounds was very general; and though the middle of the century saw the gradual springing up of coursing clubs, the old-fashioned country squires were long in joining the ranks of public coursers, and many of them, until a generation or two ago, bred and kept greyhounds, which they used entirely for their own amusement. By degrees they were weaned from private to public coursing; and with the advent of railways they found
