266 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



and foxes, that such a condition of things had existed. He 

 says: 



" Well is it known that sith the Gascon King, 

 Never was wolf seen, many nor some ; 

 Nor in all Kent nor in Christendome ; 

 But the fewer wolves (the sooth to sain,) 

 The more bene the foxes that here remaine." 



This animal seems to have been able to take care of itself, 

 when all others have vanished before the exterminating tread 

 of human progress. The game laws protect the Red Fox in 

 England to an uncertain degree ; but the Gray Fox protects 

 itself here in a certain degree, without the aid of game laws, 

 and seems in many districts, to defy all our efforts to exter- 

 minate it ; while its sagacity, dexterity and cunning, seem 

 only to have been increased by the difficulties and dangers of 

 its environment. 



Fox-hunting in the Middle and Southern States, is quite 

 as much a subject of enthusiasm, as it has been in England ; 

 although it is neither so expensive nor so technical with us. 

 We don't pay fifty guineas a couple for our hounds, or keep 

 studs of "hunters" at prodigious cost; yet we are fox-hunt- 

 ers after a rude and untechnical manner ; and although we 

 do not ride in white tops and corduroys, yet we ride to the 

 purpose ; and through the rude and break-neck exigencies of 

 thicket, forest, fallen trees, precipitous hills, rough rocks, 

 precipices, quaggy swamps and fatal quicksands, we are still 

 the eager and staunch hunters of a game as staunch. Our 

 horses doubly trained in the deer and fox-hunt, are more 

 wiry and active than the English hunters, although they may 

 .not be so heely in passing over open ground, or so well trained 

 in leaping over hedges and ditches ! And, finally, as for 

 dogs, their genealogies have been quite scrupulously preserved 

 in the old States. Even at this day, we frequently find the 

 Shaksperian ideal of the dog, still carefully maintained : 



