THE NEW FOREST DEERHOUNDS 271 



happens to be in excess of my fair allowance it is not for 

 me to hazard an opinion, but I am bound to confess that 

 in my coolest and whitest cords I felt painfully conscious 

 that my appearance on a London platform on so sultry 

 a morning was rather that of a mountebank, and I could 

 not disguise from myself that the travelling public evidently 

 thought so too. And this notwithstanding the fact that I 

 had at the last moment discarded my hunting-crop, as 

 being incompatible with appearances in such harvest-like 

 weather, and had armed myself with an ordinary cane, 

 which at least always robs me, even when in Ireland, of the 

 idea that I am going out hunting at all. As a matter of 

 fact, a white umbrella would have been no whit more 

 incongruous, and would, indeed, have proved a far more 

 serviceable companion. No matter ; I was soon carried 

 out of grimy London, past Woking's grim cemetery, past 

 the near neighbourhood of Caesar's Camp and the Long 

 Valley — over which, even at that early hour, the heavy 

 dust-clouds hovered angrily, bidding even your over- 

 worked correspondent hug himself pharisaically. The 

 outlook now was bright and green, healthy corn-crops 

 hiding the brown arable of Hampshire, while its grass 

 meadows grew richly by the side of every rivulet. 



Now I want to give vent to a grumble, to echo a 

 grievance, not as a mere hunting-man, but as a member 

 of the great country-loving public. If there is one time 

 of the year in which we have, or should have, the privilege 

 of lightening the monotony of a railway journey — nay, of 

 making it the medium of pleasantest enjoyment — it is 

 when being whisked through rural scenery in springtime. 

 Not an Englishman or Englishwoman but finds delight 

 in marking the country bursting into new life, assuming 

 its fresh, many-coloured garb of leaf, and flower, and 

 herb. What meets his or her eye now — meets it ob- 

 trusively, unavoidably, blatantly — but Vandalism in its 

 coarsest and most glaring form ? Yellow advertisement 

 boards and monster notices, of this physic or that tooth- 

 wash, thrust themselves in hideous prominence before the 

 vision and across the foreground of the most lovely land- 

 scape when you look forth from the carriage-window for a 



