50 The Course, the Camp, the Chase 



considerable risk. On arriving in America, they made a 

 tour with the horse, who everywhere drew the crowds 

 they desired, but much disappointment was sometimes 

 evinced that the horse was so much quieter than they 

 had been led to expect. " I guess," said my informant, 

 " it kinder seemed as if the horses had somehow got into 

 the wrong boxes at Liverpool, and that ' Cruiser ' had 

 gone to the bottom after all." He further told me that 

 they had been a long time before they had been able to 

 meet with another horse resembling " Cruiser " in appear- 

 ance, and that they had been most lucky in getting one 

 so like, that even those who knew them scarcely could 

 tell one from the other. I asked him how he managed to 

 satisfy those who were too curious about the supposed 

 " Cruiser's " docility, and he answered that he always put 

 it to them that it was the result of the extraordinary 

 powers of taming, by one " of their own fellow-country- 

 men," and that no other nation on earth could have 

 produced a man to have achieved the same. This bit 

 of bunkum, he said, appealed to their national pride, and 

 invariably satisfied them. 



In nothing, not even shooting, has the public taste 

 been more educated than in fishing. In my boyhood 

 there was only about one angler where there are thousands 

 now, and every available place has, perforce, to be strictly 

 preserved. A rather impudent letter was written a short 

 time ago to a friend of mine, the writer mentioning that 

 he was the secretary of a fishing club, which numbered 

 nearly two thousand members. My friend has some 

 ornamental water, partly in his park, and partly in his 

 pleasure-grounds, which is stocked with coarse fish. After 

 mentioning who he was, the writer proceeded to state 



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