272 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN 



out with me, and I am happy to say that, unlike ninety-nine 

 men out of a hundred calling themselves sportsmen in the present 

 day, he really understood all arts of woodcraft, and was safe to 

 be entrusted with a horn, either to call the hound or to make 

 me understand at a distance what was happening. To entrust 

 a young sportsman with a horn is the greatest compliment that 

 can be paid him : to an infinity of old ones whom I know, all 

 that I could conscientiously offer them would be a cork to stop 

 up their mouths, to prevent them too-tooing on their obnoxious 

 wind-instrument, deceiving the hounds, or mystifying and 

 deafening their hearers. The horn, the flute, and the fiddle (I 

 am now carrying my Reminiscences from the field to the 

 drawing-room of the fair sex, and I assure my reader in no 

 jocular vein) have caused more matrimonial unhappiness than 

 any other kind of instrument known, and that is saying some- 

 thing ; and I am aware of many ladies who have let the use of 

 the harp and pianoforte fall, rather than have to bear the 

 sharps and flats please ye, married gentlemen, be not angry, I 

 apply these words to the gamut, not to you personally mis- 

 placed by their husbands, as well as the erroneous notes and 

 false concords, or indeed no concord at all, to which they were 

 subjected, bearing all the blame the while for their commission. 

 Were I advising young ladies as well as gentlemen, I should bid 

 them ascertain, as one of the chief points of domestic felicity, if 

 their admirers played on any wind-instruments, or moved the 

 bowels of fiddles into uncompassionate strains ; and if they dis- 

 covered that they either straddled around a double-bass or 

 violoncello, induced from the fiddle noises running from the 

 gruff grunt of a sow in farrow up to the dying shrieks of a shrill 

 house mouse, or made wry faces over a flute, why I would have 

 every proposition for an espousal refused, or else the swain 

 should submit to his catgut, flute and horn being stringently 

 bound up from use or abuse in the marriage settlements. Heroes 

 or admirers ought not for their own sakes to play on horns or 

 flutes; the first makes them resemble ^Eolus or the personifi- 

 cation of the stormy south wind, and the second takes from the 



