aking yourself, as it were, his servant, instead of keeping him
ever as yours. I will not deny that I have known a lady to fall into
this vice from hunting; but so also have I known ladies to marry their
music-masters and to fall in love with their footmen. But not on that
account are we to have no music-masters and no footmen.

Let the hunting lady, however, avoid any touch of this blemish,
remembering that no man ever likes a woman to know as much about a horse
as he thinks he knows himself.

THE HUNTING FARMER.

Few hunting men calculate how much they owe to the hunting farmer, or
recognize the fact that hunting farmers contribute more than any other
class of sportsmen towards the maintenance of the sport. It is hardly
too much to say that hunting would be impossible if farmers did not
hunt. If they were inimical to hunting, and men so closely concerned
must be friends or enemies, there would be no foxes left alive; and
no fox, if alive, could be kept above ground. Fences would be
impracticable, and damages would be ruinous; and any attempt to maintain
the institution of hunting would be a long warfare in which the opposing
farmer would certainly be the ultimate conqueror. What right has the
hunting man who goes down from London, or across from Manchester, to
ride over the ground which he treats as if it were his own, and to which
he thinks that free access is his undoubted privilege? Few men, I
fancy, reflect that they have no such right, and no such privilege, or
recollect that the very scene and area of their exercise, the land that
makes hunting possible to them, is contributed by the farmer. Let any
one remember with what tenacity the exclusive right of entering upon
their small territories is clutched and maintained by all cultivators in
other countries; let him remember the enclosures of France, the vine and
olive terraces of Tuscany, or the narrowly-watched fields of Lombardy;
the little meadows of Switzerland on which no stranger's foot is allowed
to come, or the Dutch pastures, divided by dykes, and made safe from all
intrusions. Let him talk to the American farmer of English hunting, and
explain to that independent, but somewhat prosaic husbandman, that in
England two or three hundred men claim the right of access to every
man's land during the whole period of the winter months! Then, when he
thinks of this, will he realize to himself what it is that the English
farmer contributes to hunting in Eng