s to scurry,
With music in plenty--oh, where was the hurry?"

But it is more than eighty years since Blue Cap and Wanton ran their
race over Newmarket Heath, which for speed has never been excelled by
any modern hounds.

And it is a curious fact, that although Somerville, the author of The
Chase, died in 1742, his poem contains as clear and correct directions
for fox-hunting, with few exceptions, as if it were written yesterday.
So that the art must have arrived at perfection within sixty or seventy
years. In the long reign of George III. the distinction between town and
country was much broken down, and the isolation in which country squires
lived destroyed. Packs of hounds, kept for the amusement of a small
district, became, as it were, public property. At length the meets of
hounds began to be regularly given in the country newspapers.

With every change sportsmen of the old school have prophesied the total
ruin of fox-hunting. Roads and canals excited great alarm to our
fathers. In our time every one expected to see sport entirely destroyed
by railroads; but we were mistaken, and have lived to consider them
almost an essential auxiliary of a good hunting district.

Looking back at the manner in which fox-hunting has grown up with our
habits and customs, and increased in the number of packs, number of
hunting days, and number of horsemen, in full proportion with wealth and
population, one cannot help being amused at the simplicity with which
Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who comes from a country where people seldom amuse
themselves out of doors (except in making money), tells in her "Sunny
Memories," how, when she dined with Lord John Russell, at Richmond, the
conversation turned on hunting; and she expressed her astonishment
"that, in the height of English civilisation, this vestige of the savage
state should remain." "Thereupon they only laughed, and told stories
about fox-hunters." They might have answered with old Gervase Markham,
"Of all the field pleasures wherewith Old Time and man's inventions hath
blessed the hours of our recreations, there is none so excellent as the
delight of hunting, being compounded like an harmonious concert of all
the best partes of most refined pleasures, as music, dancing, running
and ryding."

Mrs. Stowe's distinguished countryman, Washington Irving, took a sounder
view of our rural pleasures; for he says in his charming "Sketch
Book:"--

"The fondness for rural life among the hig