2 66 THE COVERTS 



take the consequences. Moreover, driving incalculably 

 increases the head of game. The old cocks who used to 

 escape scot-free, leaving the poults and cheepers to be 

 butchered, head the flights as was always their custom, 

 and are shot down in place of saving themselves to 

 spoil the next breeding season. No doubt the trim- 

 ming of the rambling hedgerows and the grubbing of 

 copses and spinneys in agricultural districts where the 

 soil is valuable tend to make the battue a matter of 

 necessity if a gentleman means to offer fair sport to 

 his friends. But even in these districts, and far more 

 elsewhere, the coverts are the glory and beauty of the 

 British Isles. We have no desire to make invidious 

 comparisons, but on the Continent you have the forest 

 rather than the covert. In our idea nothing can 

 possibly be more gloomy than the endless stretches 

 of dark pine in Scandinavia, whether they offer 

 protection from the blazing summer sun or are snow- 

 laden in the winter-time and spangled with icicles. In 

 the glorious beech-woods of Germany you are impressed 

 with a brooding sense of their solemnity, and tread 

 gingerly, as during high mass in a cathedral, upon a 

 crackling carpet of withered leaves. So you feel in 

 looking down the aisles and arching cloisters through 

 the stately columns of the clean-stemmed pines in the 

 valleys of the Schwarzwald, when the bracken beds 

 are shrivelled and collapse to the first frosts. As for 

 the French forests, where there are swamps and im- 

 penetrable thickets, they are so vast, and the dwarfed 

 timber is so overcrowded, that herds of wolves breed 



