Price Collier, in his book “England and the English,” has dedicated a whole chapter to English sport, on which the nation spends every year $223,888,725, more than the cost of her entire military machine, navy and army together. On fox hunting alone she spends $43,790,000. This love of sport is an old English trait, shared by both sexes. One of the first books printed in England was a book on sport, “The Bokys of Haukyng and Huntyng,” supposed to be written by a lady, Juliana Berners, the prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell, and published for the first time in the new black art in 1486. A schoolmaster of the abbey school of St. Albans had arranged the edition, and it is therefore sometimes quoted as “The Book of St. Albans.” No wonder, then, that such a popular subject was readily chosen by the sign painters, and that they love to picture the hunted animals, the white hart and the fox, and not less often the faithful companions of the hunter, dog and horse, hawk and falcon. [Illustration: THE PACK-HORSE IN ·CHIPPENHAM·] A great rôle is played by the horse, not only as the heraldic animal in the coat of arms of the Saxons and of the House of Hanover, but the real beast, from the good old pack-horse to the lithe-limbed racer. In the early Middle Ages, when the roads were so bad that it was impossible for heavy wagons to travel on them, the pack-horse was the only medium for the transportation of goods, post-packages, and mail. Those were hard days for impatient lovers, who would have preferred to send their _billets-doux_ in Shakespearean fashion, “making the wind my post-horse.” Sometimes the horse’s burden, the wool-pack--the wool business being the chief trade in England in the twelfth century--appears on the signboard. In fact, in the time of Ben Jonson “The Woolpack” was one of the leading hostelries of London. Another sign is the race-horse, celebrated by Shakespeare in such lines as:-- “And I have horse will follow where the game Makes way, and run like swallows o’er the plain.” from “Titus Andronicus” (II, ii), or those other lines in “Pericles” (II, i):-- “Upon a courser, whose delightful steps Shall make the gazer joy to see him tread.” In the reign of Henry VIII, a tavern called “The Running Horses” existed in Leatherhead, a place not exactly fitted for noble hunters, since a contemporary poet complains about the beer being served there “in rather disgusting conditions.” Not infrequently we find more or less happy portraits of famous race-horses, such as “The Flying Dutchman” and “Bee’s Wing”; sometimes even a hound was honored in this way, guarding the entrance of a tavern as his famous Roman colleague, pictured in mosaic, did in the days of antiquity. “The Blue Cap” in Sandiway (Cheshire) was such a sign. In Chaucer’s time it was a popular fashion to decorate the horses with little bells, as we may infer from the Abbot’s Tale:--