ter-of-fact men who go out shooting are
apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress
upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking.
These huntsmen are also prone to a histrionic, prancing gait and to
an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth or of
onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit. Similarly in athletic
sports there is almost invariably present a good share of rant and
swagger and ostensible mystification--features which mark the histrionic
nature of these employments. In all this, of course, the reminder of
boyish make-believe is plain enough. The slang of athletics, by the way,
is in great part made up of extremely sanguinary locutions borrowed from
the terminology of warfare. Except where it is adopted as a necessary
means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any
employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the occupation in
question is substantially make-believe.

A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and similar
disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they admit of other
motives being assigned for them besides the impulses of exploit and
ferocity. There is probably little if any other motive present in any
given case, but the fact that other reasons for indulging in sports are
frequently assigned goes to say that other grounds are sometimes present
in a subsidiary way. Sportsmen--hunters and anglers--are more or less in
the habit of assigning a love of nature, the need of recreation, and the
like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime. These motives are no
doubt frequently present and make up a part of the attractiveness of
the sportsman's life; but these can not be the chief incentives. These
ostensible needs could be more readily and fully satisfied without the
accompaniment of a systematic effort to take the life of those creatures
that make up an essential feature of that "nature" that is beloved
by the sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the
sportsman's activity to keep nature in a state of chronic desolation by
killing off all living thing whose destruction he can compass.

Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the existing
conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact with nature can
best be satisfied by the course which he takes. Certain canons of good
breeding have been imposed by the prescriptive example of a predatory
le