when
the sputtering is beginning and the eager impetuosity of the young is
driving men three at a time into the same gap, when that wild excitement
of a fox just away is at its height, and ordinary sportsmen are rushing
for places, though at these moments the hunting parson may be able to
restrain himself, and to declare by his momentary tranquillity that
he is only there to see the hounds, he will ever be found, seeing
the hounds also, when many of that eager crowd have lagged behind,
altogether out of sight of the last tail of them. He will drop into the
running, as it were out of the clouds, when the select few have settled
down steadily to their steady work; and the select few will never look
upon him as one who, after that, is likely to fall out of their number.
He goes on certainly to the kill, and then retires a little out of
the circle, as though he had trotted in at that spot from his ordinary
parochial occupations, just to see the hounds.

For myself I own that I like the hunting parson. I generally find him
to be about the pleasantest man in the field, with the most to say for
himself, whether the talk be of hunting, of politics, of literature, or
of the country. He is never a hunting man unalloyed, unadulterated, and
unmixed, a class of man which is perhaps of all classes the most tedious
and heavy in hand. The tallow-chandler who can talk only of candles,
or the barrister who can talk only of his briefs, is very bad; but the
hunting man who can talk only of his runs, is, I think, worse even than
the unadulterated tallow-chandler, or the barrister unmixed. Let me
pause for a moment here to beg young sportsmen not to fall into this
terrible mistake. Such bores in the field are, alas, too common; but the
hunting parson never sins after that fashion. Though a keen sportsman,
he is something else besides a sportsman, and for that reason, if for no
other, is always a welcome addition to the crowd.

But still I must confess at the end of this paper, as I hinted also
at the beginning of it, that the hunting parson seems to have made a
mistake. He is kicking against the pricks, and running counter to that
section of the world which should be his section. He is making
himself to stink in the nostrils of his bishop, and is becoming a
stumbling-block, and a rock of offence to his brethren. It is bootless
for him to argue, as I have here argued, that his amusement is in itself
innocent, and that some open-air recreatio