INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 



and such like vermin, as being game ; I do not. Therefore I dealt not 

 with any of these, nor apologise for not dealing with them. 



Again. Fox-hunting on horseback, in a well-fenced, arable, or 

 pasture country, is the finest of all field sports, beyond a question. 

 But the facts, that one pack of foxhounds is now kept at Montreal, 

 that another was kept a few years since by the members of the British 

 legation at Washington, and that a few planters, in two or three 

 Southern States, amuse themselves occasionally and irregularly by 

 fox-hunting, do not constitute fox-hunting an American field sport ; 

 which it is not ; as is demonstrated by the undeniable fact, that there 

 are not above three States out of thirty, more or less, in which the 

 fox is pursued as anything but vermin. 



There are, moreover, many reasons which render it almost impossible 

 that fox-hunting ever shall become an American field sport. In the 

 Northern and Eastern States, where only, as a general rule, the coun- 

 try is sufficiently cleared of timber to allow of this pursuit in perfec- 

 tion, the severity of the winter, and the jealousy of farmers in regard 

 to trespass on their lands, and the breaking of their fences, combine 

 to render it impracticable. In the Southern States, the woodland 

 character of the country, and the frequency of swamps, bayous, and 

 similar obstacles, destroy all its peculiar excellences, and detract infi- 

 nitely from its excitement, and its scientific character. 



Yet once more. Had fox-hunting been, what it is not, an American 

 field sport, I should still have dismissed it in a few pages. Because, 

 being a sport thoroughly understood, and carried to the utmost perfec- 

 tion in the Old World ; a sport, so far as it is one here at all, per- 

 fectly identical on the two sides of the Atlantic, and as such, having 

 no peculiarities, and requiring no new precepts here ; and, above all, 

 being a sport on which more able and excellent treatises have been 

 written than on any other in the whole range of sporting subjects, and 



