who hunt are not more iniquitous than men who go out fishing, or
play dominoes, or dig in their gardens. Maxima debetur pueris
reverentia, and still more to damsels; but if boys and girls will
never go where they will hear more to injure them than they will
usually do amidst the ordinary conversation of a hunting field,
the maxima reverentia will have been attained.

As to that other charge, let it be at once admitted that the
young lady who has become of the horse horsey has made a fearful,
almost a fatal mistake. And so also has the young man who falls
into the same error. I hardly know to which such phase of
character may be most injurious. It is a pernicious vice, that of
succumbing to the beast that carries you, and making 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