Some men meet the hounds now thirty and forty miles away from home. They breakfast comfortably at home, then step into the train, and are whirled away with their horses and grooms; have a gallop, come home, or perhaps go out to a grand luncheon; lounge down to their club, or do a few calls, then dine, and go to one of the theatres to see the last new thing; finish up with a supper or a ball, or perhaps both.
Old Squire Broadfurrow has ridden his stout, easy-going hack to cover, has had a clinking day, and a fox run into, as the crow flies, about eight-and-twenty miles from his home. The old man, nothing daunted, jogs quietly along and pulls up at the first country inn, orders a chop for himself and a bucket of gruel for his horse, gets home in good time to entertain three or four choice souls at dinner, ride the run over again, and talk of some shooting they are going to have on the morrow. Reader, which is the pleasanter style of the two? which the most healthy? Railways and hunting I cannot reconcile with my ideas of sport; there is a sort of cockneyism about it that I do not like; it seems to me poor "form."
Men change, too, in their ideas as well as their dress. I was talking some time ago to an old friend of mine who had been an inveterate fox-hunter, did his six days a week, and spent the seventh in the kennel; if you asked him what Sunday it was, you always got the same answer, "Infliction Sunday."
I asked him how he was getting on in the hunting line.
"Hunting, my dear fellow; why, I have given it up years ago--all humbug! What on earth is the use of a man making a guy of himself, putting on a pink coat, top-boots, and uncomfortable leather breeches, and for what?--to gallop after a lot of yelping dogs, and to catch a fox which is of no earthly use to any one when he is brought to hand; endangering your neck, breaking fences, and destroying land and the crops. Hunting is an idiotic fashion; half the men only hunt for the sake of dress, and for mounting the pink. If they must hunt, why not dress like reasonable beings, in comfortable cords, gaiters, and a shooting-jacket? Ah! then you would not see half the men out you do now. I am quite ashamed to think I ever hunted. Just come and look at my shorthorns, will you?"