My own experience is too limited to allow me to pass judgment with certainty as to the relative speed of the different beasts of the chase, especially as there is so much individual variation.  I consider the antelope the fleetest of all however; and in this opinion I am sustained by Col.  Roger D. Williams, of Lexington, Kentucky, who, more than any other American, is entitled to speak upon coursing, and especially upon coursing large game.  Col.  Williams, like a true son of Kentucky, has bred his own thoroughbred horses and thoroughbred hounds for many years; and during a series of long hunting trips extending over nearly a quarter of a century he has tried his pack on almost every game animal to be found among the foot-hills of the Rockies and on the great plains.  His dogs, both smooth-haired greyhounds and rough-coated deer-hounds, have been bred by him for generations with a special view to the chase of big game—­not merely of hares; they are large animals, excelling not only in speed but in strength, endurance, and ferocious courage.  The survivors of his old pack are literally seamed all over with the scars of innumerable battles.  When several dogs were together they would stop a bull-elk, and fearlessly assail a bear or cougar.  This pack scored many a triumph over blacktail, whitetail, and prong-buck.  For a few hundred yards the deer were very fast; but in a run of any duration the antelope showed much greater speed, and gave the dogs far more trouble, although always overtaken in the end, if a good start had been obtained.  Col.  Williams is a firm believer in the power of the thoroughbred horse to outturn any animal that breathes, in a long chase; he has not infrequently run down deer, when they were jumped some miles from cover; and on two or three occasions he ran down uninjured antelope, but in each case only after a desperate ride of miles, which in one instance resulted in the death of his gallant horse.

This coursing on the prairie, especially after big game, is an exceedingly manly and attractive sport; the furious galloping, often over rough ground with an occasional deep washout or gully, the sight of the gallant hounds running and tackling, and the exhilaration of the pure air and wild surrounding, all combine to give it a peculiar zest.  But there is really less need of bold and skilful horsemanship than in the otherwise less attractive and more artificial sport of fox-hunting, or riding to hounds, in a closed and long-settled country.

Those of us who are in part of southern blood have a hereditary right to be fond of cross-country riding; for our forefathers in Virginia, Georgia, or the Carolinas, have for six generations followed the fox with horse, horn, and hound.  In the long-settled Northern States the sport has been less popular, though much more so now than formerly; yet it has always existed, here and there, and in certain places has been followed quite steadily.