Contrast the pleasure that the man with no idea beyond his boots, coat, tie, galloping and jumping, extracts from a day’s hunting, with that which the man who is a genuine “hunter” obtains. Putting aside the social pleasures of the chase, the meeting of friends by the covert side, and the incidents of interest and amusement in the field, the pleasure of the one is dependent on being well mounted in a good country after a straight-necked fox; and he is an exacting and hypercritical follower of hounds. The other feels the longest day too short, and can enjoy hounds puzzling out a line, bustling a fox through woodlands, or driving him over a moor, with one idea uppermost --to be there to see every detail of their work as if he were a hound himself. Weather, indifferent scent, bad countries, ugly fences, and even an imperfect mount, are but to him difficulties he can delight in fighting with. He rides to hunt; but he who hunts to ride will, as years pass by, find the bad days are too many, the good days too few, the country too familiar to ever taste the rapture and expectation that charmed his younger days: either he abandons the chase or comes out for air, exercise, and gossip. But from youth to age the other’s interest never flags. When a boy the hounds are a wonder; the country is an immense and mysterious paradise; the hard man is his model; the huntsman his hero; and in every fox he sees the possibility of the run of the season; truly the life with horse and hound is his ideal of earthly bliss. For him, as for us all, time brushes away the mysteries, and the scene loses its fresh enchantment. Hope is the richest treasure of warm-blooded youth, gilding each day with glorious possibilities, but the old enemy is gentler with him than with the other. He may no longer spring lightly on to the hunter with the wild eye and winging quarters, feeling equal to sending him along, no matter where, no matter how far--his eye kens each corner of the once unknown land, he has tasted all the joys and triumphs that the chase can give. The red-letter days, he knows, are few and far between, and when they come they but jog his memory of a better. But if his heart no longer beats with the hot anticipation of the long ago, his experience gives him a conscious power, and an ability to appreciate niceties unnoticed by the crowd; his memory is a storehouse in which he delights to rummage. The melancholy that must accompany age, he, like others, may not escape from--the moments when he re-peoples his country with those who have gone, and remembers the voices that are heard no more. But the landscape from the covert side is all the dearer to him for the echo of voices long since stilled, and the cry of those hounds whose blood still flows in the streaming black and white and tan with whom he still holds a place.