Every one knows how the possessors of such “trophies” as the heads and horns of “big game” love to decorate their halls with these mementoes of the chase. I was once a visitor at a house which was not only adorned in this way, but contained also a human head that had been sent home by a member of a certain African expedition and “preserved” by the skill of the taxidermist. When I was invited by the owner of the head--the _second_ owner--to see that particular trophy, it was with some misgivings that I acquiesced; but when, after passing up a staircase between walls plastered with portions of the carcases of elephant, rhinoceros, antelope, etc., I came to a landing where, under a glass case, was the head of a pleasant-looking young negro, I felt no special repugnance at the sight. It was simply a part--and, as it seemed, not a peculiarly dreadful or loathsome part--of the surrounding dead-house; and I understood how mankind itself may be nothing more than “big game” to our soldier-sportsmen abroad. The absolute distinction between human and non-human is a fiction which will not bear the test either of searching thought in the study or of rough experience in the wilds. Iniquitous as the Game Laws are, I have often thought it strange that Kingsley, even when regarding them, quite justly, from the poacher’s standpoint, should have hurled at the game-preserver that eloquent denunciation: There’s blood on the game you sell, squire, And there’s blood on the game you eat. without in the least realizing the full truth of the statement. For there, literally, is blood on the “game” which the squire (or the poacher) disposes of, viz. the blood of the “game” itself; and that Kingsley should have forgotten this, is a singular proof of the way in which the lower animals are regarded as mere goods and chattels, and not as creatures of flesh and blood at all--except to cook and eat. The very use of the word “game,” in this sense, is most significant. As mention has been made of the fall of the Royal Buckhounds, a few words must be said of the man who chiefly brought it about. The Rev. J. Stratton was Master of Lucas’s Hospital, Wokingham, a charitable institution founded in 1663, where a number of aged labourers live as pensioners; and as Wokingham lay in the centre of the hunting district, he was well placed for observing what went on, and for obtaining exact information: he had, moreover, a first-hand knowledge of “sport,” and his detestation of it was based on his own earlier experiences, as well as on a keen sense of fair play. Of all the active workers with whom I have been privileged to be associated, Mr. Stratton was the finest; I have known nothing more courageous than the way in which, almost single-handed at first, and with the whole hunting fraternity against him, he gradually “pulled down” (to use a pleasant sporting term) the cruel and stupid institution which was carried on in the Sovereign’s name and at the expense of the public.