would she always love an ath- partridge-shooting when dogs. lete, whom she knew to be a are used. fool, in preference to one who was neither? The three "guns" are soon over the hedge and into the lane, and the basket being opened, Lord Holyhead surveys its contents with great satisfaction, and having devoted himself for some time to the pigeon - pie and the claret, under the influence of that refreshment declares partridge-shooting to be the queen of field-sports. He is immediately tackled for this assertion by Lady Gertrude herself, and his answer is one which so exactly expresses my own sentiments on the subject that I give it entire. I have said exactly the same thing myself, long before I read, and long after I had forgotten, 'All Down Hill.' On being asked if he really preferred it to grouse-shooting "Infinitely superior,' he answered with a vigorous application to the claret. I cannot admit the comparison. Look at the variety of a day's shooting in a low country. The constant change of scene. The snug farm on the rising ground, the pretty village in the valley, the rich autumnal woods to back their slopes of bright yellow and intense green. Luxuriant hedgerows everywhere, a glorious river gliding peacefully to the sea, and Lady Gertrude with her pony-carriage for a foreground! Then think of those eternal tracts of moor. Now that is what I object to in grouse - shooting - the same scenery, the same objects, the same grey, the same brown, the same purple. 'Pon my life, it's almost as bad as the sea." To this may be added the greater variety of shots in The rest of this description is equally good. The gradual approach of the cool and fresh September evening, the dew rising, the birds beginning to call from the stubbles-all appeal to the veteran's memory with the sweetness of dried rose-leaves. By the bye, why is it that partridges have given over calling? It was one of the cheeriest sounds one used to hear on a September evening. Now, as far as my own experience goes, it is seldom audible. The modern scarcity of cover may have something to do with it, for I have heard it in Wales where cover is abundant. "Shouting" the natives call it. A pretty little picture this luncheon-party, -the English lane with its hedges of hawthorn and sweet - brier and the tall elms on one side, the wide stretch of bright - green roots on the other, showing well against the dark wood beyond: the pretty girl with her ponies, and her three admirers, as they all are seated round her, only indeed such a picture as may be seen in almost every part of England in September and October, but with a never-failing charm though witnessed for the hundredth time. When the keeper, an old servant, ventures on a civil hint that it is time to move, the party breaks up, and John Gordon, who has been disturbed by Gertrude's demeanour towards him, misses his three first shots, to the un speakable astonishment of the of these remarks myself—and Two other gentlemen of fiction we have yet to mention whose nerves were upset by a somewhat different cause, though not unconnected with womankind. The scene in 'The Small House at Allington' is very true to nature. Crosbie, en gaged to the old squire's niece, goes out shooting with the squire's son, whom he endeavours to pump with the object of ascertaining whether the old gentleman is likely to give the young lady a marriage portion. Bernard Dale resents this cross-examination, and returns an unfavourable answer. I re member that in my youth I had a slight altercation with my host before starting, and it upset us both for the day. He shot badly, but I could not shoot at all. I missed every bird that came near me, and finally gave up my gun in despair to the head keeper. There were four of us out, and the bag which was thirty-seven brace ought, with decent shooting, to have been nearer sixty. There is a popular prejudice according to which field-sports tend to harden and brutalise the character, a prejudice which sporting fiction of the best kind is well calculated to rebuke. I will begin with Sir Walter Scott, a keen sportsman in his youth, but showing clearly how the sportsman's instincts do not refuse to mingle with the instincts of humanity. His intercession on behalf of the gallant badger, who had maintained such a stout fight against the whole Mustard and Pepper family, and which provoked such an extremity of wonder in Dandie Dinmont, is one instance. In another-that inimitable picture of the death of the fox in 'Rob Roy,' which we wonder that Landseer never painted-Scott has a word of pity for "poor Reynard"; and again in The Betrothed,' in his capital description of the hawking party, he represents the cry of the heron as protesting against "the wanton cruelty" of his persecutor. Yet Scott loved to be in at the death. We see it again in the "burning the water" in 'Guy Mannering,' where Bertram desired to be put ashore, as he could not witness without pain the sufferings of the salmon, who flapped about in the bottom of the boat in their death agonies; and it is curious to note how not only in fiction, but in one's own personal experience, these two rival instincts come into collision with each other. I remember some two years ago I took part in an otter hunt. I ran with the dogs. I was as keen as any one present to witness a kill, yet when after a long hunt, lasting for several hours, the otter was at last beaten by the hounds, I would have given something to know that he had escaped. I have often, when watching a covey of partridges or seeing rabbits feeding and frisking outside a plantation, without a gun in my hand, almost wished that I had never grown so fond of shooting them. Let Sympathy with the fox has often animated good sportsmen, as it is said that sympathy with the criminal has often animated many good Christians, however deeply they execrated his crime. us speak of the fox, at the moment, in the language of our forefathers, as "the villain," "the nightly robber," and the parallel is complete. Bromley Davenport tells us that when he has seen a beaten fox lying down in a hedgerow, he has often tried to get the hounds away from him. Yet, had he been killed, Davenport would have been very sorry not to be "up." Trollope, too, in a capital description of a run with the hounds in Can you Forgive Her?' shows that he was not insensible to emotions of the same kind. This mixture of softness and harshness, which we see in so many sportsmen,-sportsmen, that is, of the best type, and equally conspicuous in sailors and soldiers, between whom and the sportsman there is a strong affinity,-is surely very suggestive. I have sometimes fancied that these two rival passions might have been implanted in us for wise purposes the one to soften the heart towards sympathy with pain and misery; the other to harden it against those trials which, besetting our state of probation, are said to be necessary to the perfecting of the human character, and at the same time to form that sterner moral fibre which, while nations remain as they are, is needful for their defence against aggression. The value of field-sports as a nursery for soldiers has, of course, been too often insisted to make it necessary to dwell upon it here. on I have quoted these passages in support of my contention that English gentlemen are by means insensible to the harsher aspects of field-sports, and that in their pursuit of them, apart from the personal gratification which they afford, they are actuated by a belief that their wholesome influence largely predominates over any objectionable elements which are no doubt to be found in them. All the writers we have named are so many witnesses compound which makes brave, to their undying popularity chivalrous soldiers and sailors, with all classes but the superior and strong merciful rulers. few, who still cling to the old superstition that a fox-hunter is necessarily an illiterate boor, and a game - preserver little better than a Front de Boeuf. Thackeray points out how all the villagers follow the hounds on foot, and similar scenes may be witnessed at every meet in the kingdom. The mechanics and operatives flock out of Leicester in the same way when the Quorn meet in the neighbourhood. Whyte Melville's friend, Sawyer, who travelled down to Market Harborough with one of the keenest fox-hunters in Leicestershire, found him buried in a volume of Tennyson. Pollock, in Can You Forgive Her?' is a man of letters. All these, and more that could be named, are wholesome protests against the vulgar creed, echoes of which may still be heard in holes and corners, that field-sports are a brutal and tyrannical relic of feudalism, abhorred by the peasantry, who would gladly rise up against them had they any chance of success. Fieldsports, together with the love of natural history, which is their twin sister, are, of course, at the bottom of an Englishman's love of rural life, and are to a great extent answerable for that peculiar compound of suppressed gentleness and outward hardness which, according to Lord Beaconsfield, is one note of the English character, especially of the English aristocracy. It is the Conceding all they can ask to the revilers of field-sports, the novels which deal with them are at all events preferable to some which have more recently become the fashion. I think my meaning may be further illustrated by Coleridge's well-known comparison between Fielding and Richardson. Richardson, of course, must not be ranked with the class of novelists whom I have been comparing with the representatives of "Sport in Fiction." Yet what Coleridge says is nevertheless quite applicable to the case before us. He preferred the so-called brutality of 'Tom Jones' to the so-called morality of 'Pamela' and 'Clarissa Harlowe.' And brutal though fieldsports may be, yet it is better that the young should revel in the description of a good run, followed by "a kill in the open," than brood over works which, as Coleridge says of Richardson's famous novels, "poison the imagination of the young with continued doses of tinct. Lytt." Therefore I am all for the cause of Sport in Fiction. And I wish another succession of writers with the literary skill of Melville, Lawrence, and Trollope would arise to present us with fresh works of the imagination, breathing the same masculine and healthy tone, and the same "cheerful, sunshiny, breezy spirit" which Coleridge recognised in Fielding. FROM THE OUTPOSTS. TIGERMAN. THE depressing horror of a great famine is a thing not to be lightly recalled or described; but at the time so readily does the human temperament adapt itself to abnormal surroundings-the gruesome details make very little impression on a mind inured. A man's capacity for pity is as limited as are his other faculties; and in the midst of scenes which he will never be able to recollect without a shudder, he soon becomes-I will not say callous or hard-hearted, but acquiescent and resigned to the workings of a Providence which must, after all, bear the responsibility for its own acts. During the Indian Famine of '99 I was employed for some months on special relief work in a corner of the province of Rajputana, and I soon acquired that armour of stoicism without which no man of ordinary sensibility could have endured such surroundings. I had seen the countryside strewn with the corpses of wretched beings, who through fear or ignorance had refused to leave their homes to seek relief until too late; I had seen cholera sweep down with the dusk of night on a crowded famine camp, and slay its thousands before the morning; I had witnessed the last extremity of demoralisation to which wretched humanity can be driven by hunger-the mangled corpse by the road side, and the furtive, hang-dog look of the unfortunate who has fed. I had thought myself impervious to horror; but I confess that my philosophy was not proof against the story of the Tigerman, which was told me one night, after dinner, by Cotterell of the Bombay Army, who was on famine duty in the district next to mine. Their His district was a hilly tract of jungle - country, inhabited chiefly by tribes of Bhils, the aboriginals of India. These little fellows were very badly hit by the famine, for thrift is a thing unknown to them, and they never make provision against a bad season. ancient and simple remedy for a scarcity in their own homes was to plunder their neighbours, and this, in all simplicity of heart, they now proceeded to do; but it did not serve them, for this time their neighbours were nearly as badly off as themselves. Also the strong hand of the British Government intervened, and after a village or two had been raided and sacked a party of troops was sent to keep order. Their arrival was the signal for a stampede to the woods and hills; the Bhils, basing their expectations on their former experience at the hands of certain native potentates, looked for nothing less than a general massacre; the relief works which were opened by |