HOW SPOET IS SPOILED. 



Thr spoiling of sport is a performance only too easy, 

 whether intentionally or otherwise, and whatever the 

 sport may consist off. Sport social, political, or of the 

 field, may be ruined ; the court, the camp, and the grove 

 are none of them exempt from casualties. 



But it is not of the sport which may be enjoyed or 

 marred in the political arena or the gilded saloon that I 

 would speak. Everyone knows how persistently the 

 wrong thing is said and done in these localities by people 

 who ought to know better, but who don^'t know and won^t 

 learn. It is on the mischief done to the pursuit of the 

 fox by ignorance, oflBiciousness, selfishness, &c., that I 

 frame my discourse ; and really, when the difficulties that 

 surround a master of hounds are considered, not only is 

 it a matter of surprise that any man should be found 

 with sufficient perseverance to enable him to fill the 

 arduous post of M.F.H. for more than one season ; but, 

 given the man, it is a still more wonderful matter how he 

 can, in the face of so many obstacles as beset his path, 

 bring his hounds to a covert side at all, much less find or 

 kill a fox. Some of the principle antidotes to sport are 

 the following : 



First come landowners who don't care about hunting, 

 and are not sufficiently unselfish to take any trouble in 

 furtherance of a pursuit in which they don't join. They 

 may keep their gates locked, or decline to allow drains or 

 earths to be stopped on their ground, and discourage 



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