Chilly Fox-Hunting. 53 



only at such leaps as he must take, or which will 

 win him a distinct advantage. 



England is naturally a hunting country. But 

 here, Lord save the mark ! there are no foxes 

 to speak of. Scent won't lie, as a general thing, 

 with the thermometer below thirty (though scent 

 is one of those mysterious things which only 

 averages according to rules, and every now and 

 then shows an unaccountable exception), and the 

 obstacles are snake fences or stone walls with 

 lumpy, frozen ground to land on, or, belike, a pile 

 of bowlders or a sheet of ice. A bad fall means 

 potentially broken bones or a ruined horse, and 

 while you are beating cover for the fox who won't 

 be found, you are shaking with the cold, and your 

 clipped or over-heated beast is sowing the seeds 

 of lung-fever. 



You, Patroclus, were once laid up five months 

 by landing on a snag the further side of a most 

 harmless-looking stone wall, and tearing out some 

 of the coronal arteries. 



There are plenty of good horseback sports 

 without a resort to what is clearly out of the lati- 

 tude. If you wait for good hunting weather, the 

 crops interfere with your sport, and our farmers 

 have not the English inducement to welcome the 

 hunt across the fields, tilled at the sweat of their 

 brow. In the South, both weather and much 

 waste land make fox-hunting more easy to carry 



