All the surroundings of the chase minister to man’s passion for novelty, change, excitement, and to his love of movement, of display of colour, or of the picturesque. The scene in which each act takes place varies not only with the formation of the ground, the alternation of hill and vale, of woodland and field, but alters its dress with every month, or with the infinite changes wrought by sun and skies. The line of a fox may be guessed, but never counted on; the pace of a run may be fast or slow; the end may be near or far distant. Scent, as incomprehensible as woman, may be good, bad, or indifferent; and when you trust it, it may suddenly jilt you; when cold, may turn as suddenly hot. The ill fortune of a day may be turned by a happy hit of hound or huntsman, or a run lost by a careless halloo or an unlucky cast. Your place with the pack will often depend on a decision taken quick as lightning at a critical moment, or your discomfiture arise from half a pound too much pull on your rein as you come up to a fence. All these, and a thousand other elements of chance, keep the fox-hunters’ passion evergreen. The fisherman may weary of flogging the unresponding waters; the best shot, no matter how satisfactory his own performance, may feel sated with killing, grow disgusted at the shriek of dying hares, and have moments when he asks in vain for a logical defence of pleasure derived at the expense of wholesale slaughter and mutilation. There is no sport without blood, but there is no field sport with so little bloodshed about it as hunting. When the common fate overtakes the little marauder of the night, it is usually after a well-matched struggle, and his end is swift as the lightning flash. Every act in the drama on nature’s stage is full of interest and life, from the moment that hounds burst like a flood through the kennel door, the huntsman astride his knowing horse shoves his horn into the case, and “whips” scramble into their saddles--until, when the Master has sounded “home,” the last good-night has been answered as heads are turned in different directions, and the patter of the pack on the muddy road, and the echo of the horses’ feet, fades on the ear as at kennel fadge they trot home in the dusk. And in the interval between the dawn and close of a hunting-day no man can tell what he may do or what he may see; a wild racing ten minutes’ burst, twenty-five minutes’ glorious galloping and jumping, or fifty minutes over the broad vale. However many good things a man in a long life may see with hounds, he will never see two alike; each will make a different call on his valour or discretion, and yield some new experience of the wonderful power of a good horse.