70 SHORT MASTERSHIPS 



viduals, booted, capped, and spurred. Let a man in 

 these days bring four or five men in scarlet besides 

 himself to the meet, and we shall be told how " splen- 

 didly he does things," and much wonderment will be 

 expressed if he fail to show sport " after all the trouble 

 he takes." 



His successor, unless a man of very strong character, 

 will hardly like to substitute for six long-tailed horses 

 with riders complete in scarlet, white breeches, silver 

 chains and whistles, his modest equipment of first and 

 second whippers-in, equipped in brown cords and 

 mounted on short-tailed nags, with a light lad in 

 dark tweed and breeches and leggings to ride second 

 horse. If, however, he manfully sets his face against 

 what Anstruther Thomson scornfully termed the 

 " pageantry of the chase," he will want the very best 

 of luck in his first season to enable him to show such 

 sport as will silence all detractors, or he will very soon 

 find out that he is held to " do the thing badly," which 

 cannot fail to aggravate even a philosopher, and 

 possibly his first season may be his last. 



It appears to me, if fox-hunting is to last, that 

 economy will have to be studied, and that the endea- 

 vour of the twentieth-century sportsman should be 

 to restore as much as possible the simplicity that the 

 sport has lost since it became ultra-fashionable. We 

 are told that the great crowds which now ornament 

 many of our hunting-fields are not wanted by either 

 the farmers or the residents, and that the field-money 

 which is levied was instituted with a view to lessening 

 these crowds. Now w^e used to hear not very long ago 

 a good deal also about the " Simple Life." What if 



