316 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN 



not under the punishment of the statutes, what is to prevent any 

 man from surreptitiously getting possession of a letter marked 

 " private," and reading it, if it suits his purposes or his will, to 

 the public ? I do not think that any man has a right to write 

 what he pleases to another, and then to suppose, if the contents 

 of his letter, in justice to the community, demand publicity, 

 that they will be withheld. The assumption that secrecy will 

 be accorded in such a case is unwarrantable ; and more, the 

 receiver of such a communication would seriously commit him- 

 self if he assented to become the silent sharer of a dishonourable 

 mystery. A man might communicate murder or robbery, and 

 write above the information, " private and confidential " ; but 

 he who became possessed of the guilty knowledge is not bound 

 to conceal it. In viewing this subject, it is not a mere abstract 

 question, but the consequences of information so received, and 

 the way in which the communication was got at, that must be 

 considered. A revelation under the mark of privacy may, or 

 may not, be justly deemed available to public knowledge, accord- 

 ing to its nature. One of the secondary places where the 

 absence of an appeal to arms is felt, is in the interests of our 

 various hunting counties ; and, as such, it becomes still more 

 matter to be dealt with in the present Reminiscences. The old 

 law among masters of hounds used to be, that when once the 

 bounds of a hunting country were defined, no other master of 

 hounds could hunt a cover within those limits, without the leave 

 of the master in possession. By courtesy, the owners of the 

 lands and woods could not give their possessions to a foreign 

 hunt, although they could refuse to the master situated in their 

 locality the run of them. If a foreign master of hounds accepted 

 an invitation to enter the bounds of his neighbour's country, 

 though on the invitation of individual proprietors, the master 

 whose country was infringed on would have had a casus belli, in 

 which every gentleman would have borne him out against the 

 aggressor; and he could have turned the infringement of his 

 bounds into a quarrel, in which his opponent would not have 

 been permitted to have shot at him. One of the quarrels arising 



