COURSING 



seeking for a hare? It is quite an art or science. 

 You must consult not only the wind and weather 

 of to-day, but of the night before— and of every 

 day and night back to last Sunday, when probably 

 you were prevented by the rain from going to 

 church. Then hares shift the sites of their country 

 seats every season. This month they love the 

 fallow field — that, the stubble ; this, you will see 

 them, almost without looking for them, big and 

 brown on the bare stony upland lea — that, you 

 must have a hawk's eye in your head to discern, 

 discover, detect them, like birds in their nests, 

 embowered below the bunweed or the bracken ; 

 they choose to spend this week in a wood im- 

 pervious to wet or wind — that, in a marsh too 

 plashy for the plover ; now you may depend on 

 finding Madam at home in the sulks within the 

 very heart of a bramble-bush or dwarf black-thorn 

 thicket, while the squire cocks his fud at you 

 from the top of a knowe open to blasts from all 

 the airts ; in short, he who knows at all times 

 where to find a hare, even if he knew no one 

 single thing else but the way to his mouth, cannot 

 be called an ignorant man — is probably a better 

 informed man in the long run than the friend on 

 his right, discoursing about the Turks, the Greeks, 

 the Portugals, and all that sort of thing, giving 

 himself the lie on every arrival of his daily paper. 

 We never yet knew an old courser (him of the 



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