56 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
without this glorious sport we should want horses 
for our cavalry, and men of the right kind on their 
backs, to face the Huns who would destroy us. 
Apart from all these questions and considera- 
tions, which humanitarians would laugh at, the fox 
is a being one cannot help loving. For he is, like 
man’s servant and friend the dog, highly intelligent, 
and is to the good honest dog like the picturesque 
and predatory gipsy to the respectable member of 
the community. He is a rascal, if you like, but a 
handsome red rascal, with a sharp, clever face and 
a bushy tail, and good to meet in any green place. 
This feeling of admiration and friendliness for the 
fox is occasionally the cause of a qualm of conscience 
in even the most hardened old hunter. “ By gad, 
he deserved to escape!” is a not uncommon ex- 
clamation in the field, or, “I wish we had been 
able to spare him!” or even, “It was really hardly 
fair to kill him.” 
Here let me relate an old forgotten fox story— 
a hunting incident of about eighty years ago—and 
how it first came to be told. When J. Britton, a 
labourer’s son in a small agricultural village in 
Wiltshire, and in later life the author of many big 
volumes on the “ Beauties of England and Wales,” 
came up to London to earn a precarious living as 
bottle-washer, newspaper office boy, and in various 
other ways, it was from the first his ambition to 
see himself in print, and eventually, because of his 
importunity, he was allowed by a kindly editor to 
write a paragraph relating some little incident of 
