Sons of fire, Vol. I.Braddon, M. E. (Mary Elizabeth)
General
Sons of fire, Vol. I.
Braddon, M. E. (Mary Elizabeth)
English fiction -- 19th century
He discovered that it was, above all, a hunting neighbourhood; but that
it was also a shooting neighbourhood; and that there was bad blood
between the men who wanted to preserve pheasants and the men who wanted
to hunt foxes. From the point of view of the rights of property, the
shooters would appear to be in their right, since they only wanted to
feed and foster birds on their own land; while the hunting-man--were
he but the season-ticket-holding solicitor from Bloomsbury--wanted to
hunt his fox over land which belonged to another man, and to spoil that
other man's costly sport in the pursuit of a pleasure which cost him,
the season-ticket holder, at most a stingy subscription to the hunt he
affected. But, on the other hand, hunting is a strictly national sport,
and shooting is a selfish, hole-and-corner kind of pleasure; so the
hunting men claimed immemorial rights and privileges as against the
owners of woods and copses, and the hatchers of pheasants.
Allan found another and more universal sport also in the ascendant at
Matcham. The neighbourhood had taken lately to golf, and that game
had found favour with old and young of both sexes. Everybody could
not hunt, but everybody could play golf, or fancy that he or she was
playing golf, or, at least, look on from a respectful distance while
golf was being played. The golf-links on Matcham Common had therefore
become the most popular institution in the neighbourhood, and the
scarlet coat of the golfer was oftener seen than the fox-hunter in
pink, and people came from afar to see the young ladies of Matcham
contest for the bangles and photograph-frames which the golf club
offered as the reward of the strong arm and the accurate eye.
Allan, who could turn his hand to most things in the way of physical
exercise, was able to hold his own with the members of the golf club,
and speedily became a familiar figure on the links. Here, as elsewhere,
he met people who told him he was like Geoffrey Wornock, and who
praised Wornock's skill at golf just as other people had praised his
riding or his shooting.
"He seems to be something of a Crichton, this Wornock of yours," Allan
said sometimes, with a suspicion of annoyance.
He was sick of being told of his likeness to this man whom he had never
seen--weary of hearing the likeness discussed in his presence; weary of
being told that the resemblance was in expression rather than in actual
feature; that there was an indefinable something in his face which
recalled Wornock in an absolutely startling manner; while the details
of that face taken separately were in many respects unlike Wornock's
face.
"Yet it is more than what is generally called a family likeness,"
said Mrs. Mornington of the Grove, a personage in the neighbourhood,
and the cleverest woman among Allan's new acquaintances. "It is the
individuality, the life and movement of the face, that are the same.
The likeness is a likeness of light and shade rather than of line and
colour."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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