It has often been said that the passion of Englishmen for field sports is really due to this love of Nature and of animals; that, like sheepdogs (who, when they are not trained to guard sheep, will, by an irresistible impulse, follow and harry them), they feel compelled to have _something to do_ with hares and foxes and partridges and grouse, and salmon; and they find that the only thing to be done is to course and hunt and shoot and angle for them. Into this mystery I cannot dive. The propensity which can make kind-hearted men (as many sportsmen unquestionably are) not merely endure to kill, but actually take pleasure in killing, innocent living things, and changing what is so beautiful in life and joy into what is so ineffably sad and piteous, wounded and dying, remains always to me utterly incomprehensible. But it is simply a fact that lads trained from boyhood to take pleasure in such “sports,” and having, I doubt not, an “hereditary set of the brain” towards them, like so many greyhounds or pointers, never feel the _ribrezzo_, or the remorse, of the bird or beast murderer, but, escaping all reflection, triumph in their own skill, and at the same time enjoy the woods and fields and river-sides where their quarry leads them. To do them justice,—as against many efforts lately made to confound them with torturers of a very different class,—they know little of the pain they inflict, and they endeavor eagerly to make that pain as brief as possible. Nevertheless, Sport is an inexplicable passion to the non-sporting mind; and, moreover, one not very easy to contemplate with philosophical forbearance, much less with admiration.