VARIETY IN HUNTING COUNTRIES 201 



Green Isle so especially delightful ; and this variety- 

 is certainly very pleasantly manifest in Meath, where 

 on a Friday the sportsman may find himself racing 

 over the level expanses of pasture in the neighbour- 

 hood of Dunshaughlin, let us say, and next day 

 twenty-six miles to the north he may be watching 

 the Meath bitches rise and disappear over the grey 

 stone walls that intersect those light, grassy uplands 

 that look down on Virginia Road Station. 



This variety of country endears it to the sportsmen 

 who dwell therein and "never have two days con- 

 secutively in the same sort of country" — one of the 

 advantages a settler in the glorious Limerick district 

 claimed for it when I was there lately. Though I am 

 by no means in sympathy with the peripatetic fox- 

 hunter who wanders about in search of sport, 

 " shifting his pitch " from year to year, yet I most 

 thoroughly enjoy a day or two in a new country ; 

 but, as a friend puts it, "if all England and Ireland 

 outside the towns were one big rolling patch of 

 Leicester grass, divided by bullfinches of the regula- 

 tion pattern and distance apart, a visit to a distant 

 country would be robbed of more than half its 

 present charm ; and hunting would certainly be 

 much more commonplace if all the countries were 

 exactly alike, if precisely the same methods were in 

 force, and if the packs were of a dead level standard 

 of quality." Those who have never hunted outside 

 the crack countries may be excused for believing 

 that sport elsewhere must be tame and feeble, so 

 much has been written in praise of these favoured 

 districts ; but the mistake is a great one, as has 



