■26 MANT'AL FOE YOUNG SPOBTSMEN. 



qualities and ideas, to which, though at times, perhaps, 

 pushed to extremes and degenerating into something of 

 license, he yet owes much of his excellence ; and for which 

 his country has a right to be proud and thankful, in that 

 she may rely on him to rough it, as the noble of no other 

 land can do, in the hour of toil and trouble. 



And this brings me to the gist and bearing of this my 

 introduction. When first it was my fortune -to become a 

 dweller on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, to 

 be a lover of field-sports, was in some sort to be tabooed, 

 as a species of moral and social pariah — the word sports- 

 man was understood to mean, not him who rises with the 

 dawn, to inhale the pure breeze of the uplands or the salt 

 gale of the great south bay, in innocent and invigorating 

 pursuit of the wild-game of the forest or the ocean wave ; 

 but him who by the light of the flaring gas-lamp watches, 

 flushed and feverish, through the livelong night, until the 

 morning star, to pluck his human pigeon over the green- 

 field of the faro table. The well-to-do merchant foreboded 

 no good of the younger man, who borrowed twenty-four 

 hours in a month from business and Walls-treet, for a 

 day's snipe-shooting at Pine Brook, or a day's fowling at 

 Jem Smith's. The lawyer, who, by chance, loved such 

 sports, took them on the sly — packed up his gun and shoot- 

 ing toggery in his carpet-bag, and stole across the Fulton 

 ferry in full court-fig, having the dread before his eyes, 

 of becoming, thenceforth, a briefless barrister, should but 

 one of his clients begin even to suspect that he knew the 

 butt-end of a Manton from its muzzle, much less could 



