102 WARWICK WOODLANDS. 



of water he imbibes, with every footstep he prints upon 

 the turf or gravel of his garden — when he abstains from 

 every sort of animal food — and, above all, when he abstains 

 from his great pursuit of torturing his fellow men — ^then 

 let him prate, if he will, of sportsmen's cruelty." 



'Tor show me one trade, one profession, wherein one 

 man's success is not based upon another's failure; all 

 rivalry, all competition, triumph and rapture to the win- 

 ner, disgrace and anguish to the loser! And then these 

 fellows, fattened on widows' tears and orphans' misery, 

 preach you pure homilies about the cruelty of taking life. 

 But you are quite right about the combination of pleas- 

 ures — the excitement, too, of quick motion through the 

 fresh air — the sense of liberty amid wide plains, or tangled 

 woods, or on the wild hill tops — this, surely, to the re- 

 flective sportsman — and who can be a true sportsman, and 

 not reflective — is the great charm of his pursuit." 



"And do you not think that this pleasure exists in a 

 higher degree here in America than in our own England ?" 



"As how, Frank?— I don't take." 



"Why, in the greater, I will not say beauty — for I don't 

 think there is greater natural beauty in the general land- 

 scape of the States — but novelty and wildness of the 

 scenery! Even the richest and most cultivated tracts of 

 America, that I have seen, except the Western part of 

 Niew York, which is unquestionably the ugliest, and dullest, 

 and most unpoetical region on earth, have a young un- 

 tamed freshness about them, which you do not find in 

 England. 



"In the middle of the high-tilled and fertile cornfield 

 you come upon some sudden hollow, tangled with brake 

 and bush, which hedge in some small pool where fioat the 

 brilliant cups and smooth leaves of the water lily, and 

 whence, on your approach, up springs the blue-winged 

 teal or gorgeous wood-duck. Then the long sweeping 

 woodlands, embracing in themselves evei*y variety of 

 ground, deep marshy swamp, and fertile level thick-set 

 with giant timber, and sandy barrens with their scrubby 

 undergrowth, and difficult rocky steeps : and. above all, the 

 seeming and comparative solitude — the dinner carried 

 along- with you and eaten under the shady tree, beside the 

 bubbling basin of some spring — all this is vastly more ex- 

 citing, than walking through trim stubbles and rich turnip 



