266 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
, 
and foxes, that such a condition of things had existed. He 
BAYS: 
‘Well is it known that sith the Gascon King, 
Never was wolf seen, many nor some; 
Nor in all Kent nor in Christendome ; 
But the fewer wolves (the sooth to sain,) 
The more bene the foxes that here remaine.” 
This animal seems to have been able to take care of itself, 
when all others have vanished before the exterminating tread 
of human progress. The game laws protect the Red Fox in 
England to an uncertain degree; but the Gray Fox protects 
ituc!f here in a certain degree, without the aid of game laws, 
and seems in many districts, to defy all our efforts to exter- 
minate it; while its sagacity, dexterity and cunning, seem 
only to have been increased by the difficulties and dangers of 
its environment. 
Fox-hunting in the Middle and Southern States, is quite 
as much a subject of enthusiasm, as it has been in England; 
although it is neither so expensive nor so technical with us. 
We don’t pay fifty guineas a couple for our hounds, or keep 
studs of “hunters” at prodigious cost; yet we are fox-hunt- 
ers after a rude and untechnical manner; and although we 
do not ride in white tops and corduroys, yet we ride to the 
purpose; and through the rude and break-neck exigencies of 
thicket, forest, fallen trees, precipitous hills, rough rocks, 
precipices, quaggy swamps and fatal quicksands, we are still 
the eager and staunch hunters of a game as staunch. Our 
horses doubly trained in the deer and fox-hunt, are more 
wiry and active than the English hunters, although they may 
not be so heely in passing over open ground, or so well trained 
in leaping over hedges and ditches! And, finally, as for 
dogs, their genealogies have been quite scrupulously preserved 
in the old Scates. Even at this day, we frequently find the 
Shaksperian ideal of the dog, still carefully maintained :— 
