ays remember that, whatever triumphs the
Americans may win in the domain of sport, they win them by virtue of the
English blood that is in them.

* * * * *

It is, of course, inevitable that in many particulars the American and
English ideas of sport should be widely different. There is an old, old
story in America of the Englishman who arrived in New York and, on the
day after his arrival, got out his rifle and proceeded to make enquiries
of the hotel people as to the best direction in which to start out to
find buffalo--the nearest buffalo at the time being, perhaps, two
thousand miles away. It is a story which has contributed not a little to
contempt of the Britisher in many an innocent American mind. It happens
that in my own experience I have known precisely that same blunder made
by an American in England.

I had met an American friend, with whom I have shot in America, at his
hotel on the evening of his arrival in London one day in November. In
the course of conversation I mentioned that the shooting season was in
full swing.

"Good," he said. "Let me hire a gun somewhere to-morrow and let's go
out, if you've nothing to do, and have some shooting."

Nothing, he opined, would be simpler, or more agreeable, than to drive
out--or possibly take a train--to some wild spot in the vicinity of
London--Clapham Common perhaps--and spend a day among the pheasants. It
was precisely the Englishman and his buffalo--the prehistoric instinct
of the race ("What a beautiful day! Let us go and kill something!")
blossoming amid unfamiliar conditions. My American friend wanted to
kill an English pheasant. He had heard much of them as the best of
game-birds. He had eaten them, much refrigerated, in New York and found
them good. And he knew nothing of preserving and of a land that is all
parcelled out into parks and gardens and spinneys. Why not then go out
and enjoy ourselves? Before he left England he had some pheasant
shooting, and it is rarely that a man on his first day at those
conspicuous but evasive fowl renders as good an account of himself as
did he. Similarly every American with a sound sporting instinct must
hope that that traditional Englishman ultimately got his buffalo.

Many times in the United States in the old days have I done exactly what
that American then wished to do in London. Finding myself compelled to
spend a night at some crude and unfamiliar Western town, I have made
enq