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How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly tracked down, with the game quite up, he will turn on his pursuers, and die with his teeth fast in his enemy's throat!" "I believe you are a fox-hunter in disguise," I laughed. "Well, I have hunted as a boy," he said, "and I know something of what those red-coated gentlemen are feeling.
The horse of the fox-hunter, of the race-rider, of the mounted soldier every one of these noble beasts has the fullest understanding of his rider's calling, and gives it his completest sympathy with the greatest assistance in his power. Who that has known the horse at his best can have failed to observe and recognize and be moved by this fact?
And yet there were those who could denounce the war! So we went on for a few of those dark days, Raffles very glum and grim, till one fine morning the Yeomanry idea put new heart into us all. It struck me at once as the glorious scheme it was to prove, but it did not hit me where it hit others. I was not a fox-hunter, and the gentlemen of England would scarcely have owned me as one of them.
And now I was to appear before that house as the bearer of ill-tidings. Ah, duty often wears a gruesome countenance; yet it is a sign of courage to face this duty down, and I sat more firmly in my saddle and rode nearer to the High Sheriff. He was a stern and determined man; he was short of stature, stout of frame, and sat his powerful horse like the fox-hunter that he was.
The poor beasts are here pursued and run down by much greater beasts than themselves, and the true British fox-hunter is most undoubtedly a species appropriated and peculiar to this country, which no other part of the globe produces. I hope you apply the time you have saved from the riding-house to useful more than to learned purposes; for I can assure you they are very different things.
But to my narrative! You must know that there are but two of us, sons of a country squire, of old family, which once possessed large possessions and something of historical renown. We lived in an old country-place; my father was a convivial dog, a fox-hunter, a drunkard, yet in his way a fine gentleman, and a very disreputable member of society.
There lay a fine pullet stone dead; just beyond lay the fox, dead too. "Well, of all things," said the fox-hunter, open-mouthed, "if he hasn't gone and climbed the roost after that pullet, and then tumbled down and broken his own neck!"
The red-nosed fox-hunter, who had taken a little too much wine at the house, made a maudlin eulogy of the deceased, and wished to give the view halloo over the grave; but he was rebuked by the rest of the company. They all shook me kindly by the hand, said many consolatory things to me, and invited me to become a member of the hunt in my father's place.
"Frank," said the old fox-hunter to my father, "the summons is come, as we used to say when I was a dragoon, to 'boot and saddle. I told the doctor a month ago that my wind was touched, but he would have it that I was only a whistler." He paused for breath. "The best horse that ever bore pig-skin on his back, won't stand too many calls ugh! ugh! ugh!" Another pause.
To pass over gambling, tippling, and other practices which cannot be easily spoken of in good society, let us look to the other shapes in which man lets himself out for instance to horse-racing, hunting, photography, shooting, fishing, cigars, dog-fancying, dog-fighting, the ring, the cockpit, phrenology, revivalism, socialism; which of these contains so small a balance of evil, counting of course that the amount of pleasure conferred is equal for it is only on the datum that the book-hunter has as much satisfaction from his pursuit as the fox-hunter, the photographer, and so on, has in his, that a fair comparison can be struck?
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