56 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



without this glorious sport we should want horses 

 for our cavalry, and men of the right kind on their 

 backs, to face the Huns who would destroy us. 



Apart from all these questions and considera- 

 tions, which humanitarians would laugh at, the fox 

 is a being one cannot help loving. For he is, like 

 man's servant and friend the dog, highly intelligent, 

 and is to the good honest dog like the picturesque 

 and predatory gipsy to the respectable member of 

 the community. He is a rascal, if you like, but a 

 handsome red rascal, with a sharp, clever face and 

 a bushy tail, and good to meet in any green place. 

 This feeling of admiration and friendliness for the 

 fox is occasionally the cause of a qualm of conscience 

 in even the most hardened old hunter. " By gad, 

 he deserved to escape ! " is a not uncommon ex- 

 clamation in the field, or, " I wish we had been 

 able to spare him ! " or even, " It was really hardly 

 fair to kill him." 



Here let me relate an old forgotten fox story 

 a hunting incident of about eighty years ago and 

 how it first came to be told. When J. Britton, a 

 labourer's son in a small agricultural village in 

 Wiltshire, and in later life the author of many big 

 volumes on the " Beauties of England and Wales," 

 came up to London to earn a precarious living as 

 bottle-washer, newspaper office boy, and in various 

 other ways, it was from the first his ambition to 

 see himself in print, and eventually, because of his 

 importunity, he was allowed by a kindly editor to 

 write a paragraph relating some little incident of 



