210 The Hunting Grounds 



With some the golden age appears to have been 

 passed at school with others, later in life. Here a 

 stately old general tells of the glorious time he passed 

 as a jolly sub in the days of powder and pigtails ; and 

 there a sturdy old squire of the last generation 

 recounts with glee the doings of his time, 'when 

 hounds could run and huntsmen went the pace ;' yon 

 phlegmatic looking old divine, with blanched locks 

 and rubicund nose which bespeaks his love of the 

 pleasures of the table, relates, with intense satisfac- 

 tion, the roistering days he spent as a young man in 

 a fast regiment of Light Dragoons, when it was con- 

 sidered a " crying sin " for any one to quit the social 

 board until he had disposed of a couple of magnums 

 under his belt ; and that shrivelled-up old relic of 

 mortality, who seems to stand before us as a specimen 

 of what the hand of Time can effect on our mortal 

 frame, will prate by the hour of the jolly dogs of his 

 day, and the fascinations of town when he was a gay 

 Lothario. Each and every one has some period of 

 his life on which he loves to look back and think 

 upon, although, perhaps, he may talk much more 

 about the future. The soldier loves to recall to mind 

 the scenes of many a hard-fought day ; the sailor his 

 adventures on the heaving main ; the wanderer 

 delights in the reminiscences of travel in many lands ; 

 and the foxhunter in the stiff bursts and glorious runs 

 of bygone times ; but the sportsman who has visited 



