A BROKEN RECORD. 383 



to write. Intellect and exercise are as inseparable still as when 

 the most practical of poets held out for mens sana in corpore 

 sano. Macaulay, we are led to believe, got through more solid 

 reading (and retained it all, too) during his voyage round the 

 Cape than most men digest in a lifetime. But Macaulay was 

 not seasick. Edmund Yates kept his pen busy throughout 

 his little holiday in prison. But they made his " cell " very 

 comfortable, and I don't fancy the journalist was ever a keen 

 athlete. (Still less were the charms of outdoor life the main 

 subject of his writing.) But to the inferior mind and more 

 especially to the mind already acknowledging itself in bondage 

 to the sports of the field it is a matter of impossibility to 

 work, or even think, seriously when the body is pent and in- 

 active from week's end to week's end. To frivol is the sole 

 occupation of ninety-nine men out of a hundred on boardship or 

 in crippledom. The busy man has always spare time, on a 

 pinch. The idler's day is gone ere even begun. 



There is little comes to me from outside, through the white 

 frost and the shadowy fog, save these murmurs of lamed horses, 

 and here and there a groan over an old favourite whose doom 

 is sealed and whose destiny is the Kennels. Worse than this 

 there have been several death records in the two months of 

 hunting already past. Be the owner rich or poor, he can ill 

 spare, and seldom replace, the picked one of his stable, in the 

 middle of a season : and, more than that, he is not made of 

 the stuff of which fox-hunters are usually fashioned if he can look 

 upon the loss of his old comrade as only so much money out of 

 pocket, so much temporary inconvenience sustained. 



There is a little work, my fellow fox-hunters of the Midlands, 

 that is at least as open to you now as in the busier times when 

 duty calls you daily to the covertside. And most of you, I 

 take it, are still on the spot, waiting for this " cold snap " to 

 pass over. You cannot but remember exactly where several of 

 those little bits of wire remain that served to frighten you 

 during the past weeks? Go and see about them. Ask that 

 they may be pulled down by the owner or by you (i.e., the 



