49G FOX-HOUND, FOREST, AND PRAIRIE. 



hesitatingly a line of gates or a chain of gaps, is a truly wonder- 

 ful instinct — a talent beyond compare. And the next great 

 desideratum, a quality even more enviable still, is — not to care 

 two pence what the bounds are all this time doing. These are 

 the gifts to lighten a fox hunter's old age. Let him acquire 

 them at any price — or as Cavendish quotes of Talleyrand on 

 another hobby, "Pauvre jeune homme, quelle triste vieillesse 

 vous vous preparez ! " 



But you men and women who ride in the van — you little 

 know what we see, and how we chuckle, who ride behind. The 

 comedy of a summersault over timber, the absurdity of White- 

 leathers' legging-it up the meadow after his horse — the romance 

 of beauty awaiting the return of cavalier, or of his rival, with 

 her hunter, while skirts that are all too patent pin her to a 

 standing posture — all these, and many other things, you see 

 nothing of, in your mad career — "your eye upon hounds," for- 

 sooth ! Come with me, see the run, as others are content to 



see ^ — " D the hounds ! " and remember this is Bromley 



Davenport's say, not mine (As a lord may wear shabby clothes 

 — so can a great writer take license that a humbler daren't). 

 Talk to me no more of riding. Slow hunting, say I. Bow- 

 wow-wow. That's what a sportsman loves. So they have told 

 me from my youth up. And I never believed it till now. 



I left off hunting as it seemed in mid-winter — yet only five 

 weeks ago. Now I crawl out to find it almost summer. Then 

 hounds were whipped off at 4.30. Now they may hunt on till 

 dinner-time, or exhaustion — though, with the ground almost as 

 dry as a maidan (save that the snow showers have gently 

 damped the surface) it is difficult to see how exhaustion can 

 ensue to horse or hound or fox — which in some degree accounts 

 for the great points recently made. February, indeed, is the 

 month that raises the blinds, turns winter into spring, sets all 

 things multiplying (this is a theory, though, that with instance 

 and exception is altogether too wide to follow out here, and I 

 am thinking of lambs, lame horses, and I don't know how many 

 more things), and if only free from broken weather is invariably 



