The Sport of Our Jincestors 



keeping their noses down, but they also foil the ground and 

 spoil the scent. So this generation has an advantage in that 

 there is to-day less distraction in the shape of riot, mainly 

 as a result of the Ground Game Act : though if Mr. Gladstone 

 and his friends had been told that they were ministering to 

 the cause of Fox-hunting by passing it, they might have been 

 very much astonished. In another direction the working 

 of this Act has not been quite so useful. The privilege of 

 killing hares and rabbits presented itself to some occupiers 

 of land as the means of enlarging their opportunities for 

 sport with the gun. So that on some holdings rabbits in- 

 creased instead of being diminished, being encouraged to 

 breed in stickheaps erected for the purpose. There are few 

 greater nuisances in a hunting country than a stickheap. 

 Vixen lay their cubs in them, and litters might easily be 

 born, live, and die in a stickheap without ever being hunted, 

 because in time the Foxes will dig a large earth under the 

 wood, or take possession of the rabbit holes and defy the 

 cleverest earthstopper that ever was bred. But the stickheap 

 nuisance is more than compensated for by the first-mentioned 

 result of the Act, namely, the great advantage of having 

 got rid of so many hares. In certain countries in the 

 Midlands you will hardly see a hare from one end of the 

 season to another in places where our ancestors used to 

 shoot them by the score. 



We have now tried to sketch the respective environ- 

 ments of the three generations of country gentlemen who 

 were born in the nineteenth century. Which of them 



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