230 STRAY -AW AYS 



People Bill. The playing-fields of Eton did not as 

 surely win Waterloo as the hunting-fields and lawn- 

 tennis grounds of the kingdom won the vote for 

 women. 



In no region of sport has freedom " broadened 

 down " with greater rapidity than in hunting. Of 

 hunting, on the whole, it must be said that " Con- 

 vention's casket holds her sacred things." The red- 

 tape of tradition has long bound her hand and foot, 

 until, say, the last five -and -twenty or thirty years, 

 the proper place of woman in regard to the fox-hunter 

 has been laid down in the verse of the old hunting- 

 song — • 



" The wife around her husband throws 

 Her arms to make him stay. 

 ' My dear, it rains, it hails, it blows ! 

 My dear [crescendo], it rains, it hails, it bl(^ws ! 

 You cannot hunt to-day, you cannot hunt to-day ! " 



(wherein the wife, if right about the weather, was 

 very probably right also about the hunting ; and while, 

 still in bed, she comfortably drinks her " early tea," 

 the husband, with his collar up to his ears and his 

 back to a hedge, is asking himself why he had been 

 ass enough to think there was a fox above ground 

 on such a morning. This, however, is not the point, 

 which is sufficiently obvious). 



It was pretty late in the nineteenth century, taking 

 the unerring pages of Punch as a guide, before women 

 were tolerated (later still before they were welcomed) 

 in the hunting-field, a fact for which I find it hard to 

 blame the then masters of the situation. In those 

 early times women were obsessed (one gathers it 

 again from Punch) with the need of making them- 

 selves agreeable, which frequently meant that they 

 talked at the wrong moments and too much. (I 

 am not saying that this practice is entirely a matter 



