Farmers and City Men 223 



which we become famiUar in the course of a hunting 

 career. 



It is not for any imagined increase of revenue that the 

 farmer allows the hunt to cross his lands, protects a litter 

 of foxes in his fields, or takes mischievous puppies to walk. 

 The foxes or the puppies alone cost him more every year 

 than what he gets out of the hunting men over and above 

 the regular price of farm products. A fox will kill per- 

 haps twenty head of poultry in a single night. A hound 

 puppy may destroy a twenty-dollar lap-robe in twenty 

 minutes. The huntsmen smash his fence and leave his 

 gates open, so that he and his men have to spend the rest 

 of the day and half of the night, perhaps, looking for stray 

 cattle or sheep. What compensation is it, what consola- 

 tion, for the farmer to be told that he may get a cent or 

 two more a bushel for a hundred bushels of oats, when the 

 riders racing across his meadows frighten his cows so that 

 the shrinkage in the flow of milk amounts to dollars ? 

 What is to pay him for the premature birth of the calf from 

 his best cow, or of the lambs from the ewe that was raced 

 into the corner of the pasture ? It is his big heart, not his 

 hope of small pennies, that makes him endure all this. 



To be sure, there is supposed to be compensation for 

 damages from the hunt ; but not one farmer in ten, in 

 America at least, ever demands it. No one outside of the 

 farmer's family or the visiting neighbour ever knows of 

 the damage. The Master himself, who knows a good deal, 

 never hears the half, because farmers do not like to com- 

 plain of amounts that are trifling, and keep still even 

 when they may feel aggrieved and have met with serious 



