acquainted with its scenery and
character by the description. And yet this is absolutely necessary, if
the narration of sports in foreign countries is supposed to interest
those who have never had the opportunity of enjoying them. The want of
graphic description of localities in which the events have occurred, is
the principal cause of that tediousness which generally accompanies
the steady perusal of a sporting work. You can read twenty pages with
interest, but a monotony soon pervades it, and sport then assumes an
appearance of mere slaughter.

Now, the actual killing of an animal, the death itself, is not sport,
unless the circumstances connected with it are such as to create that
peculiar feeling which can only be expressed by the word 'sport.'
This feeling cannot exist in the heart of a butcher; he would as soon
slaughter a fine buck by tying him to a post and knocking him down,
as he would shoot him in his wild native haunts--the actual moment of
death, the fact of killing, is his enjoyment. To a true sportsman the
enjoyment of a sport increases in proportion to the wildness of the
country. Catch a six-pound trout in a quiet mill-pond in a populous
manufacturing neighbourhood, with well-cultivated meadows on either side
of the stream, fat cattle grazing on the rich pasturage, and, perhaps,
actually watching you as you land your fish: it may be sport. But catch
a similar fish far from the haunts of men, in a boiling rocky torrent
surrounded by heathery mountains, where the shadow of a rod has seldom
been reflected in the stream, and you cease to think the former fish
worth catching; still he is the same size, showed the same courage, had
the same perfection of condition, and yet you cannot allow that it was
sport compared with this wild stream. If you see no difference in the
excitement, you are not a sportsman; you would as soon catch him in
a washing tub, and you should buy your fish when you require him; but
never use a rod, or you would disgrace the hickory.

This feeling of a combination of wild country with the presence of the
game itself, to form a real sport, is most keenly manifested when we
turn our attention to the rifle. This noble weapon is thrown away in an
enclosed country. The smooth-bore may and does afford delightful sport
upon our cultivated fields; but even that pleasure is doubled when
those enclosures no longer intervene, and the wide-spreading moors and
morasses of Scotland give an idea of