202 APOLOGY FOR FOX-HUNTI^'G. 



I may perhaps be pardoned for concluding my hints 

 on hmiting, by re-quotii]g from Household Words an 

 "Apology for Fox-hunting," which, at the time I wrote 

 it, received the approbation, by quotation, of almost 

 every sporting journal in the country. It will be seen 

 that it contains a sentence very similar to one to be 

 found in Mr. Earey"s " Horse Training"— "A bad-tem- 

 pered man cannot be a good horseman." 



•" TALLY-HO : 



" Fox-hunting, I maintain, is entitled to be considered 

 one of the fine arts, standing somewhere between music 

 and dancing. For ' Tally-ho ! ' like the favourite eve- 

 ning gun of colonising orators, has been ' carried round 

 the Avorld.' The plump mole-fed foxes of the neutral 

 ground of Gibraltar have fled from the jolly cry ; it has 

 been echoed back from the rocky hills of our island pos- 

 sessions in the Mediterranean ; it has startled the jackal 

 on the moimtains of the Cape, and his red brother on 

 the burning plains of Bengal ; the w^olf of the pine 

 forests of Canada has heard it, cheering on fox-hounds 

 to an unequal contest ; and here the WTetched dingoe 

 and the bounding kangaroo have learned to dread the 

 sound. 



" In our native land ' Tally-ho ! ' is shouted and wel- 

 comed in due season by all conditions of men; by the 

 ploughman, holding hard his startled colt; by the wood- 

 man, leaning on his axe before the half-felled oak ; by 

 bird-boys from the tops of leafless trees; even Dolly 

 Dumpling, as she sees the white-tipped brush flash before 

 her market-cart in a deep-banked lane, stops, points her 

 whip, and in shrill treble screams ' Tally-ho ! ' 



" And when at full speed the pink, green, brown, and 



