OWr. Egerton Warburton 



step on the long downward path home is pain and grief. 

 But in any case all the suffering is forgotten in a very short 

 time, and these are the very aches and pains that make the . 

 sport worth having. 



There is less bodily distress about the ordinary day's 

 Fox-hunting ; in these days of motor-cars there is hardly 

 any. But no one is a real Fox-hunter unless he or she has 

 been really hungry and tired, and in that condition has 

 been obliged to ride, or perhaps to lead, a beaten horse home 

 several miles in the dark in the face of a driving storm. 

 This does not happen every day ; but the beauty of Fox- 

 hunting as a mental stimulant is that hardly any day passes 

 without your having the chance, if you choose to take it, to 

 ' stiffen the sinews,' to ' summon up the blood,' to jump the 

 fences, to think quickly, and to take decisions at full gallop. 

 These are the privileges of any member of the field who is 

 not afraid to exercise them, and form a great deal of the 

 charm that compels people to follow the Hounds, even 

 though they do not take any active part in the actual hunting 

 of the animal. 



But what shall we say of the man who hunts the Hounds, 

 and on whose sagacity so much depends } To the joy of 

 horsemanship he adds the exercise of his craft. One of the 

 most famous amateur huntsmen of the last century was 

 wont to declare that in hunting a pack of Foxhounds the 

 blanks were so many and the prizes so few that he really 

 enjoyed himself on comparatively few days in the season ; 

 but that even one day on which things went well made up 



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