FOX-HUNTING 161 



the pack will often depend on a decision 

 taken quick as lightning at a critical 

 moment, or your discomfiture arise from 

 half a pound too much pull on your rein as 

 you come up to a fence. All these, and a 

 thousand other elements of chance, keep 

 the fox-hunters' passion evergreen. The 

 fisherman may weary of flogging the un- 

 responding waters ; the best shot, no matter 

 how satisfactory his own performance, may 

 feel sated with killing, grow disgusted at 

 the shriek of dying hares, and have moments 

 when he asks in vain for a logical defence 

 of pleasure derived at the expense of 

 wholesale slaughter and mutilation. There 

 is no sport without blood, but there is no 

 field sport with so little bloodshed about 

 it as hunting. When the common fate 



i r 



