dyke,
and meet with a score of knights around her who will be willing and able
to give her eager aid should the chance of any moment require it.

There are two accusations which the more demure portion of the world
is apt to advance against hunting ladies, or, as I should better say,
against hunting as an amusement for ladies. It leads to flirting, they
say, to flirting of a sort which mothers would not approve; and it leads
to fast habits, to ways and thoughts which are of the horse horsey, and
of the stable, strongly tinged with the rack and manger. The first of
these accusations is, I think, simply made in ignorance. As girls are
brought up among us now-a-days, they may all flirt, if they have a mind
to do so; and opportunities for flirting are much better and much more
commodious in the ball-room, in the drawing-room, or in the park, than
they are in the hunting-field. Nor is the work in hand of a nature to
create flirting tendencies, as, it must be admitted, is the nature of
the work in hand when the floors are waxed and the fiddles are going.
And this error has sprung from, or forms part of, another, which is
wonderfully common among non-hunting folk. It is very widely thought
by many, who do not, as a rule, put themselves in opposition to the
amusements of the world, that hunting in itself is a wicked thing; that
hunting men are fast, given to unclean living and bad ways of life; that
they usually go to bed drunk, and that they go about the world roaring
hunting cries, and disturbing the peace of the innocent generally.
With such men, who could wish that wife, sister, or daughter should
associate? But I venture to say that this opinion, which I believe to be
common, is erroneous, and that men who hunt are not more iniquitous
than men who go out fishing, or play dominoes, or dig in their gardens.
Maxima debetur pueris reverentia, and still more to damsels; but if boys
and girls will never go where they will hear more to injure them than
they will usually do amidst the ordinary conversation of a hunting
field, the maxima reverentia will have been attained.

As to that other charge, let it be at once admitted that the young lady
who has become of the horse horsey has made a fearful, almost a fatal
mistake. And so also has the young man who falls into the same error. I
hardly know to which such phase of character may be most injurious. It
is a pernicious vice, that of succumbing to the beast that carries you,
and m