26 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
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 
