A Fox-Hunter's Paradise 



FEW pursuits in life are so conducive to the preservation 

 of one's sanity as a good day with hounds. 



Politics, finance, and the daily ration of personal 

 worries are forgotten when a game old horse cocks his 

 ears to the opening note of a hound in an Irish wood- 

 land. All around, the faces of riders are tensely eager; 

 aglow with the hope that they will soon see a brown 

 shadow streak away from the woodside and point his 

 mask for the far-off hills. 



Quite a number of those present are visitors from 

 overseas; lured by Ireland's hospitality and the unsur- 

 passed excellence of her sporting fare. 



Here, one has no Leicestershire cut-and-laids in 

 endless succession, no Pennsylvanian flights of timber 

 or Australian barbed-wire monstrosities; no, one meets 

 an endless variety of natural obstacles. Variety is the 

 keynote of Ireland's menu : stone-walls, single-banks, 

 double-banks, hedges, bog-drains, rivers, and gaps 

 filled with anything from a ladder to a rusty bed, 

 ensure that the term, sameness, can never be applied 

 to our Irish countryside. 



Others of these visitors may be having their first 

 sample of Irish sport, and they will be agreeably sur- 

 prised to find that excellent hunting does not necessarily 



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