nd a passage where Thoreau, who understood such
matters, says, that although the love of nature may be fostered by
sport, such love, when once consummate, will make nature's lover
little by little shrink from slaughter, and hanker after a diet
wherein slaughter is unnecessary.

It is sad, not for the beasts but for our souls, that, since we must
kill beasts for food (though may not science teach a cleaner, more
human diet?) or to prevent their eating us out of house and home, it
is sad that we should choose to make of this necessity (which ought to
be, like all our baser needs, a matter if not of shame at least of
decorum) that we should make of this ugly necessity an opportunity for
amusement. It is sad that nowadays, when creatures, wild and tame,
are bred for killing, the usual way in which man is brought in contact
with the creatures of the fields and woods and streams (such man, I
mean, as thinks, feels or is expected to) should be by slaughtering
them.

Surely it might be more akin to our human souls, to gentleness of
bringing up, Christianity of belief and chivalry of all kinds, to be,
rather than a hunter, a shepherd. Yet the shepherd is the lout in our
idle times; the shepherd, and the tiller of the soil; and alas, the
naturalist, again, is apt to be the _muff_.

But may the time not come when, apart from every man having to do some
useful thing, something perchance like tending flocks, tilling the
ground, mowing and forestering--the mere love of beauty, the desire
for peace and harmony, the craving for renewal by communion with the
life outside our own, will lead men, without dogs or guns or rods,
into the woods, the fields, to the river-banks, as to some ancient
palace full of frescoes, as to some silent church, with solemn rites
and liturgy?

XIII.

The killing of creatures for sport seems a necessity nowadays. There
is more than mere bodily vigour to be got by occasional interludes of
outdoor life, early hours, discomfort and absorption in the ways of
birds and beasts; there is actual spiritual renovation. The mere
reading about such things, in Tolstoi's _Cossacks_ and certain
chapters of _Anna Karenina_ makes one realise the poetry attached to
them; and we all of us know that the genuine sportsman, the man of
gun and rod and daybreak and solitude, has often a curious halo of
purity about him; contact with natural things and unfamiliarity with
the sordidness of so much human life and endeavour, amo