FOX-HUNTING 3 



And however good a man he may be with rod or 

 gun, however great may be his skill with the 

 cricket bat — in a word, however good an all-round 

 sportsman he may be, the first of November will 

 be the red-letter day in his calendar, and it is on 

 his hunting experiences that he will dwell the 

 longest and the most lovingly. The old squire of 

 whom Rogers writes so beautifully, shot and fished 

 and played cricket no doubt, but we read : — 



The fox's brush still emulous to wear, 



He scoured the country in his elbow chair. 



And old Tom Sebright on his deathbed seeing 

 " old Bluecap, and Shiner, and Bonny Lass wagging 

 her stern " is one of the most pathetic incidents 

 in the history of sport. 



One great reason for the hold which hunting 

 has upon its true votaries is its freshness. History 

 repeats itself is a truism, but equally true as the 

 truism is it that history repeats itself less frequently 

 in the hunting field than elsewhere. This may, to 

 the uninitiated, seem an exaggeration ; to the man 

 who knows hunting thoroughly it is nothing but 

 the plain, unvarnished fact. " What," says the 

 critic, " you have talked of that run which you 

 had from Hornblower Hazels, in which hounds 

 ran hard for forty-five minutes, and killed their 

 fox, and then you say that three weeks afterwards 

 you had just such another run, from the same 

 place, going field by field, and killing within a 

 field of where you killed your first fox. How do 

 you make out that history does not repeat itself 

 here ?" Well, history partially repeats itself, and 

 only partially. The line of the runs was exactly 

 the same, or so nearly the same it is not worth 



