1 86 Life and Sport on the Pacific Slope 



every day, and be none the worse for it. These 

 Nimrods acquire a knowledge of the West at first 

 hand. They see many phases of life ; they talk 

 with rich and poor, with gentle and simple, with 

 honest men and knaves. Living themselves the 

 primal life for many months, facing boldly the 

 perils of the wilderness, apprehending, as they must, 

 the obstacles that confront the pioneer, they can 

 and do assimilate the facts, — those facts so indiges- 

 tible to the traveller who sees a new country through 

 the windows of a Pullman drawing-room car. More, 

 leaving the wilderness they approach civilisation 

 by degrees, passing over the trackless forest, then 

 the blazed trail, then the foot-path, the rude coun- 

 try road, the highway, and lastly the shining 

 rails. 



The Native Son can never quite understand why 

 these thin, sun-scorched, silent men take all that 

 concerns sport so very seriously ; they wonder how 

 such men, possessed of energy, patience, powers of 

 endurance, can hold themselves aloof from the 

 traffic of the world. And it takes an Englishman, 

 and a lover of sport, to answer the question. To 

 those to whom " the long results of time " are an 

 inheritance, there comes a nostalgia for life under 

 new and more stirring conditions. The war of great 

 cities, the ignominies and indignities of the modern 

 struggle for money, or fame, or bread, drive them 

 into the silent lands, into the enchanting solitudes 

 of mountain and forest. Let it be remembered that 

 these men have enough money, and the striving for 

 more may mean the robbing of another. From this 

 point of view, their abstention becomes surely a 



