314 The Hunting Field With Horse and Hound 



what they feed upon. Men and women crowd to the covert 

 side year after year, through youth, manhood and old age, 

 principally to see how one more riddle of the chase will unravel. 



It is just at this point that some well meaning people are 

 led astray in condemning the chase. They argue that the 

 element which leads on the followers of the chase must be the 

 act of kilhng something. They straightway condemn the chase 

 as a relic of barbarism and the followers as blood-tliirsty men 

 and women, who have not felt the effects of a higher civilisation, 

 in which the critics see themselves. Nothing could be further 

 from the truth. So far as the riders are concerned, the death 

 of the animal hunted is the incident, not the object, of the 

 chase. If this were not the case, one would hardly expect to see 

 a hundred men and women banding together with a hundred 

 hounds for a hundred hard days' work in the season, on the 

 chance of killing one hundred foxes, employing in the mean- 

 time a hundred men to look after a thousand horses worth a 

 million dollars. No, a hundred cents worth of paris green in 

 the hands of a hired man, or a single steel trap in the hands 

 of a poacher, would do the Idlling far more effectually. 



By uniting in the chase the elements of war, with but little 

 of its risk and hardships, to the ardour of hunting with all its 

 woodcraft and cunning, you have as the result the most interest- 

 ing, the most fascinating, the most healthful game that was 

 ever invented by man. 



While the chase is the "image of war without its guilt," it 

 calls for the expression of nearly every manly virtue. It gives 

 to the youth courage, self control, nerve, health, and strength. 

 It leaves no stain but that comes off in the wash. It gives to 

 manhood, hardihood, resolution, and perseverance that carries 

 him on to \'igorous old age. 



And so it has come to pass that there are to-daj^ thousands 

 of men and many women, fifty, sixty, seventy, and even eighty 

 years of age, riding to hounds over some of the roughest hunt- 



