496 FOX-HOUND, F011EST, AND PRAIRIE. 



hesitatingly a line of gates or a chain of gaps, is a truly wonder- 

 ful instinct a talent beyond compare. And the next great 

 desideratum, a quality even more enviable still, is not to care 

 two pence what the hounds are all this time doing. These are 

 the gifts to lighten a fox hunter's old age. Let him acquire 

 them at any price or as Cavendish quotes of Talleyrand on 

 another hobby, "Pauvre jeune homme, quelle triste vieillesse 

 vous vous preparez \ " 



But you men and women who ride in the van you little 

 know what we see, and how we chuckle, who ride behind. The 

 comedy of a summersault over timber, the absurdity of White- 

 leathers' legging-it up the meadow after his horse the romance 

 of beauty awaiting the return of cavalier, or of his rival, with 

 her hunter, while skirts that are all too patent pin her to a 

 standing posture all these, and many other things, you see 

 nothing of, in your mad career " your eye upon hounds," for- 

 sooth ! Come with rne, see the run, as others are content to 



see it " D the hounds ! " and remember this is Bromley 



Davenport's say, not mine (As a lord may wear shabby clothes 

 so can a great writer take license that a humbler daren't). 

 Talk to me no more of riding. Slow hunting, say I. Bow- 

 wow-wow. That's what a sportsman loves. So they have told 

 me from my youth up. And I never believed it till now. 



I left off hunting as it seemed in mid-winter yet only five 

 weeks ago. Now I crawl out to find it almost summer. Then 

 hounds were whipped off at 4.30. Now they may hunt on till 

 dinner-time, or exhaustion though, with the ground almost as 

 dry as a maidan (save that the snow showers have gently 

 damped the surface) it is difficult to see how exhaustion can 

 ensue to horse or hound or fox which in some degree accounts 

 for the great points recently made. February, indeed, is the 

 month that raises the blinds, turns winter into spring, sets all 

 things multiplying (this is a theory, though, that with instance 

 and exception is altogether too wide to follow out here, and I 

 am thinking of lambs, lame horses, and I don't know how many 

 more things), and if only free from broken weather is invariably 



