It is not only with regard to hounds, but also every other description of dog used in the chase, that a degeneracy of breed is perceptible; and consequently the difficulty of procuring such as may be in any way usable is very great, either in the country or from the various dogdealers in the Gallic metropolis. An amusing French writer, Monsieur Jules Janin, in speaking of the different breeds of dogs now to be found in France, facetiously observes-" After the human race, that which the Frenchman neglects most is the race canine; it is impossible to have less anxiety about one than the other: it would really be impossible to have allowed the races to have crossed with more abandoned caprice, and at a more stupid hazard; and that is the reason why we have such très villains hommes et des très villains chiens. Come with me, if you wish to see the dogs of Paris; come to the Pont Neuf, to the left down the Rue Dauphine, when you shall have passed the statue of Henry IV., where you will find five or six artistes surrounded by five or six curs, cropped and trimmed like the box-hedges in the gardens at Versailles. One dog wears a moustache, another is cut out in lozengeshaped tufts; one is black, another is white; one is crossed with the terrier, and another with the spaniel: sometimes you discover in one dog ten crosses with others of a different species. It is enough for the dog-merchant of Paris to rear a dog and sell him; but it is not altogether a mere speculation-it is a pleasure, it is his delight. The dogmerchant of Paris is first of all perhaps a porter, a shoe-black, father of a family, and by degrees, according to chance, he becomes a dogmerchant. He is a porter by trade, which suddenly came to him when his father died, who was a porter before him. For the very reason that his father was forbidden by the landlord of his house to keep a dog, his son is determined to keep three for the mere keeping of one dog his father lost his situation; and now he, for keeping three, has lost the countenanee and support of his employer. The bitch, Zemire, which you see basking there in the sun, was the sole cause of her owner losing the affections of the cook, whose larder she had used to rob; after which misfortune, Zemire became in pup in the streets, and at length brought forth in her master's bed. Her master, seeing a chance of converting her offspring into property, reared them, and is now selling them on the Pont Neuf. I should imagine, that in place of forming your opinion of men by their countenances, or the signs of their handwriting, one could form a better judgment by the dogs they keep; for the dog is the companion and friend of man; he is his solace when he is alone; he is to him as a family when he has no other; he stands in

F F

the place of a child, a father, or a guardian; he has the eye of great intelligence; he is at times arrogant, he is jealous, he is a despot; he has, in fact, all the qualities of a sociable animal. Your dog often forces you to dispense with many of your little comforts, the doing which gives you pleasure, as it proves to yourself that you have an affection for him. Thus the best place in the chimney corner belongs to the dog; the softest arm chair is his regular couch. A man often goes out walking in the very worst of weather for the purpose of exercising his dog; he is studious to minister to his comforts; he nurses him when he is ill; and when he is taken with a love fit, his master assists him to select a mate. A man's dog is an inexhaustible subject of conversation with the neighbours; and he is an admirable pretext for numerous little disputes. For a bachelor, for a poet who is poor, for every one who is in a lonely condition, for any old maid who has no one to love her, the dog is the hope and the only solace, the very soul, the only companion; he is, as it were, the only child. We can then invariably form our judgment of a man's character by the dog that follows him and as this is the case, you can form but a very poor opinion of the bourgeois of Paris, upon looking at the dogs they are in the habit of buying. When a Parisian is about to purchase a dog, he goes to the Pont Neuf, and seeing a host of these dog-merchants, he goes up to one and demands" how much for this little caniche (cur)?" He is immediately surrounded by a crowd of not only dog-sellers, but also of other amateurs, like himself, bent upon the same errand, each giving most gratuitously his opinion and advice in the matter: the bargain is at length struck, usually for some five or six francs. Occasionally the price is as high as ten francs, but then the purchaser is of a higher grade, perhaps an ancient militaire, or employé at the Mont de Piete, or a commissary of police at least. Scarcely has our hero concluded his purchase, than his steps are directed homewards. As he approaches his own staircase, all his resolution appears to have failed him at once; a perfect tremor comes over his frame; for how shall he encounter her who has so frequently and decidedly declared to him, that no dogs should be allowed to enter their rooms? At length he summons all his courage, and at once enters his apartment. "Look, my wife," says he, "what a sweet little caniche I have brought home as a present for you." But the wife at first pouts, and refuses to accept his gift; she at length relents, and gracefully ac cepts the little canine offering. And now behold this happy pair, so lovingly aiding each other in tending this charming little caniche; they wash him, they curl him, they fatten him up, they exercise him, they teach him tricks-to open and shut the door, to walk erect on his hind legs, to march on his fore-feet alone, to sham death, to take off his master's hat, which latter is a most agreeable pleasantrie; also to fetch his own dinner from the butcher's, or to smoke a pipe most adroitly: in fact, the little caniche becomes in a few days the life and soul of the family. But this little canine picture has also its dark sides, as well as its more brilliant ones; the caniche embroils him with his neighbours; it robs their larders, it makes a dirt on the staircases, it snaps at their children; he is forced, for the sake of his caniche, to change repeatedly his domicile, but he never has the most remote idea of changing his canine protégé; or how could he appear in the streets without his dog to bark most pleasantly at the horses' heels; to run after the sparrows

in the Bois de Romainville; or to swim out and fetch his stick when thrown to the waters of the muddy Seine? Walk where you will, you invariably encounter the bourgeois and his caniche; for although many other descriptions of breeds have disappeared, the veritable Parisian caniche seems to spring up at every corner; he is amongst dogs, what the gamin de Paris is amongst the rising generation of Frenchmen."

As I have just remarked, I expect that a great many of the best races of our French dogs have almost entirely passed away. It would be now next to an impossibility to find a single specimen of le petit chien de Marquise of the eighteenth century, entirely white, and as soft as silk, and which looked so spruce in his little collar of red ribbon. Those beautiful greyhounds, used for hunting the wolf, of the time of Francis I., are now no more. The revolution of July, which destroyed. the royal preserves, gave a fatal blow to the dogs used in the chase: the hounds of Charles X. were sold " for an old song ;" and one might almost fancy that he saw the hounds of the Duke de Bourbon howling in the high-ways for their noble master, as once howled the dog of Montargis.

I would not, however, much as I deplore the degenerate races of our dogs, pass over in silence a dog-market, curious enough in itself; it is situated in the Faubourg St. Germain, opposite to the market of that name. It is a space rather narrow, in which, on every Sunday, you may meet with dogs of a far superior caste to the animals of the Pont Neuf. Here are dogs of every description suited to the chase : they are chiefly reared by farmers in the country, or by the gardes de chasse in the large forests. Besides this dog-market in the Faubourg St. Germain, you will also find other dog-merchants in the Boulevart des Capuçins, opposite Les affaires Etrangeres; it is there where they sell the best hounds, and bassets (a small crooked-legged beagle for hunting hares and rabbits); also pointers, and many other descriptions of valuable dogs, many of which-that is, the best of them-having been recently imported from England.

As I felt still a great inclination to return to France, for the purpose of seeing a little more of the chasse au sanglier, to try to become acquainted with the chasse au fusil, as well as the chasse au forcé, and to learn all I could with regard to the forests of that country and their resources, which might be made available to an English sportsman, in case he should feel inclined to undertake a sporting campaign in earnest, I sat out again for Paris at the beginning of November, where I stayed a few days, to hold a council of war as to my future peregrinations. During the short time I was staying there, I took the opportunity of calling at the bureau des forêts du gouvernement, situated in the Rue neuve du Luxemburg; here I made acquaintance with a kind of inspector of forests, an old gentleman, who, although he was a good way the wrong side of sixty, seemed as keenly alive to the pleasures of the chase as ever. He talked a good deal, as most Frenchmen do, of what they had done, and said that the two reasons for his not now going out hunting and shooting were that in the first place his eyes began rather to fail him, and in the next that nearly all the game in France had been destroyed by poachers and unfair sportsmen. He was exceedingly polite and obliging, and bringing out a large map of France, upon which were most minutely described all the forests and woodlands of the country, he took the trouble to explain to me all the best localities

for the various descriptions of chase. Many, which from ten to twenty years ago abounded with game, including boars and even red deer, were now entirely deserted by those animals; for what had not been murdered had been driven away by the peasants and other unfair chasseurs, who had given them no rest until they were extirpated. After talking the matter over for some length of time, I thanked him most sincerely and left him; and, having resolved to go immediately into the neighbourhood of either the Cote d'Or, or the Haute Marne, as that part of the country had the character of holding the greatest quantity of boars, I set out in the course of a few days on my tour, and took up my temporary abode in the picturesque little town of Chatillon-surSeine, in the former-named department. This part of Burgundy, if it had but anything bordering on fair play, would be one of the finest localities in the world for a sportsman to reside in for a few months; but, like all the rest of France, nearly every third man you meet about the country is a chasseur; and, although there are great numbers of wild boars to be found in the woods in the neighbourhood, it is entirely owing to the immense fastnesses of the forests, where these bungling sportsmen and their mongrel chiens courrans, quite unworthy of the name of hounds, harassing the animals as they do day after day, are unable to kill them. The grande Forêt de Chatillon is above fiftythousand acres without a break in it, and there are two or three more close at hand of from twenty to thirty-thousand acres of the same continuous nature. There certainly are a few roads through these forests for the purpose of carrying out the wood, and years ago, in the prosperous days of France, there might have been ridings kept in some sort of decent order to be found at intervals; but now all is allowed to grow up wild, it would be impossible to ride hunting with any effect through these impenetrable woodlands, and the labour of walking in them, and the great difficulty in finding clear places to get a shot, renders it almost impossible either to hunt the boars to bay au forcé, or even to manage them in any way with a slow hunting handful of hounds au fusil; consequently the boars live on, and laugh at their tormentors, and by the end of the season ought to be in pretty good wind, hunted as they are by curs of every description from early dawn till dusky night puts an end to the fun. And even if you should be returning home from any part of the forest long after sunset, perhaps six o'clock, you may continually hear hounds running as merrily as if they had just found: some are on hares, some have found a fox, and, perhaps, one or two of the toughest of them may be still plodding on after some old boar, who trots grunting along, and thinks, I have no doubt, that it is high time for his pursuer to turn his head in the contrary direction, and try what he can find in the savoury gutters of the town, and allow him to go in quest of his accustomed meal of acorns, or to perform his accustomed toilette by rolling for an hour or so in the slime of the forest bog.

A French chasseur never thinks it part of his duty as a good sports man to collect his pack and bring them home with him, but invariably (that is, amongst the minor fry of the game murderers, who infest all these forests) leaves his hound or hounds to find their way home when they are tired. Perhaps he treats them to a few blasts on the cow's horn, which he usually carries; but, as it is most inconvenient to smoke a pipe and play a horn at the same time, our huntsman prefers

the former, and marches off by himself to enjoy his tabac du governement, and in nineteen times out of every twenty, as far as killing goes, the delightful reminiscencies of a blank day.

It may not, perhaps, be generally known that the right of shooting in the government forests of France is entirely let to the different sportsmen who may either be residing in the neighbourhood where they are situated, or who may arrive to amuse themselves with the chase from a distance. The business is managed by an inspector, who on no account is allowed to sport himself. In the case of large forests like those near Chatillon-sur-Seine, the lettings are divided into portions of from one to three-thousand acres; and, although no one sportsman has right to trespass upon his neighbour for the purpose of drawing for his game in the first instance, he has a right to follow his hounds, after they have found the animal, in any direction they may chance to go. The forests and shootings are let on lease for six years, and the price paid is three half-pence per acre: this sum may appear at first insignificantly small; but as France is a country half covered with woods and forests throughout many of the departments towards the south and east, it must bring in a pretty good sum, a great deal more than enough to pay the wages of the gardes, who are all kept up at the expense of the government. Moreover, all the expenses arising from procès verbals, or for poaching, are paid by the government; the tenant of the shooting merely pays his three sous an acre, and is at no further trouble in the matter.

When I arrived at Chatillon-sur-Seine, the first thing which I set about was to enquire as to the probability of a stranger being allowed to go out shooting, or, as it is termed, to go to the chasse: I was informed that the whole of the forests and woods were reservés, and that unless I made the acquaintance of some of the persons who rented them, I should have but a very slight chance of seeing a boar killed in that neighbourhood. However, having learned that Monsieur B, who is a rich gentleman farmer, and the louvetier* of that arrondisement, had the best meute de chiens courrans anywhere thereabouts, I took the liberty of calling upon him; and upon making my wishes known to him, he very kindly requested me to join his turn out as often as I felt inclined during my sojourn at Chatillon.

Before I proceed to describe what sport, or rather what entire absence of sport we had, I must inform the reader that the whole thing is carried on entirely on foot, and in a very humble and unpretending style. A piqueur in a mere peasant's garb, and five or six couples of raggedlooking hounds, besides the Master, and at the outside three or four of his friends or neighbours, complete the assemblage of chasseurs.

Unfortunately for me, the very day before I arrived these hounds killed an enormous boar, which so disabled some two or three couples of them when he was at bay, that the pack were unable to be taken out for more than a week; and then for five weeks, although they went out continually, generally three times a week, they had not the luck to kill another. I am sure I went out twelve times at least with these hounds, and other parties who were constantly in the habit of going

*A louvetier is a person authorised by government to hunt when and where he' likes for the destruction of all animals that do mischief, such as wolves, boars foxes, &c.