4 COUNTRY LIFE 



B.B. No authority can repress the excitement or keep 

 the vociferous field in check, when the game is fairly 

 afoot ; and fatal accidents are of frequent occurrence 

 when a hail of shot is drifting through the covers. It is 

 much the same in Germany ; and there things have been 

 getting worse than they were, since the peasants swept 

 the country of game in the civil troubles of 1848. 

 Some great land-owners in Bohemia, Northern Bavaria, 

 and elsewhere, have wonderful quantities of hares and 

 pheasants. In the neighbourhood of their vast wood- 

 land preserves you see each outlying patch of grain 

 protected from the ravages of deer and wild boars by 

 chevaux de frise of stacked thorn-bushes. But even 

 there sport is the monopoly of an aristocratic few, who 

 seclude themselves in their domains for a short hunting 

 season ; as the Kings of Bavaria or Italy, the Emperor 

 of Austria, and the Arch Dukes, enjoy the chase of 

 the chamois or izzard in the magnificent solitudes of 

 their mountain hunting-grounds. Elsewhere you have 

 occasional grand days among the game with com- 

 paratively pitiful results ; but there is little of those 

 everyday country sports which are so keenly appreciated 

 by thousands of Englishmen. Indeed the evidences of 

 life of any kind are few and far between. Nothing can 

 be more beautiful than the Black Forest, for example : 

 you may walk on day after day from Baden-Baden 

 towards Stuttgart, through noble woods of feathering 

 beech-trees, or grand glades of clean-stemmed pines ; 

 that, with the light falling in streams through their 

 boughs on the bilberry carpet beneath them, remind 



