Those who, when the season is in full swing, are crowding and watching for a get away and a good start, and causing throughout the day untold anxiety to the huntsmen, are now in shooting-caps and leggings, chatting and indulging in gossip and chaff in a manner that would be regarded as unprofessional when in tall hats and top-boots. Probably nothing exasperates a hunting-man more than when, on the tip-toe of expectancy, as hounds speak in covert, he is compelled to listen to some bore who thinks the occasion suitable for airing his views on local or Imperial politics, or for relating his own exploits of valour the day you were not out. Business and politics should never be permitted as subjects of conversation in the hunting-field, not even during cub-hunting, when any other topic may certainly be tolerated, if not encouraged. One of the secondary pleasures of the chase is social intercourse, the cementing of friendships, and the opportunities of better acquaintance with neighbours which it affords. These opportunities are not always taken advantage of, for though we all can point to fields where most of the regular followers are on such terms as to make it almost a happy family circle, we probably all know one or more hunts where jealousy, pride, or pure foolishness spoil much of the comfort and pleasure of all. In most fields there is, however, at least one individual whom all agree in desiring to avoid,--some cad, some snob,--to escape whom we hang back in covert, jump some appalling place, or, if in a crowd, endeavour to get our worst enemy or most unselfish friend between him and us. If one of these objectionable persons, or well-meaning bores, comes out cub-hunting, we are at his mercy; he can get at us, and the music of the hounds is mingled with his ceaseless jabber; our only escape is the road home to breakfast. Oh, gentle reader, have you not often, at covert side, endeavoured to stay the torrent of “shop” poured into your ear, by assenting to any opinion, acquiescing in every view put forward, no matter at what violation to conscience and conviction? Have we not all, in the dread that an objection or divergent view, however gently expressed, might open another floodgate, been false to our creeds, and thrown our most cherished prejudices overboard? I wonder if Egerton Warburton had some particular man in his eye when he wrote the following stanza in his famous song, “Quaesitum Meritis.” I am certain that many a man who has sung this verse has thought of some one to whom the words particularly applied-- “For coffee-house gossip some hunters come out, Of all matters prating save that they’re about; From scandal and cards they to politics roam, They ride forty miles, head the fox, and go home. Such sportsmen as these we good fellows condemn, And I vow we’ll ne’er drink a _quaesitum_ to them.”