to be a
crotchet on the part of Lord Hampstead to assert that cheap things
were as good as dear, and there were some who believed that he did in
truth care as much for his horses as other people. It was certainly a
fact that he never would have but one out in a day, and he was wont
to declare that Smith took out his second horse chiefly that Jones
might know that he did so. Down here, at Gorse Hall, the Post Office
clerk had often been received as a visitor,--but not at Gorse Hall
had he ever seen Lady Frances.

This lord had peculiar ideas about hunting, in reference to sport in
general. It was supposed of him, and supposed truly, that no young
man in England was more devotedly attached to fox-hunting than
he,--and that in want of a fox he would ride after a stag, and in
want of a stag after a drag. If everything else failed he would go
home across the country, any friend accompanying him, or else alone.
Nevertheless, he entertained a vehement hostility against all other
sports.

Of racing he declared that it had become simply a way of making
money, and of all ways the least profitable to the world and the most
disreputable. He was never seen on a racecourse. But his enemies
declared of him, that though he loved riding he was no judge of an
animal's pace, and that he was afraid to bet lest he should lose his
money.

Against shooting he was still louder. If there was in his country any
tradition, any custom, any law hateful to him, it was such as had
reference to the preservation of game. The preservation of a fox, he
said, stood on a perfectly different basis. The fox was not preserved
by law, and when preserved was used for the advantage of all who
chose to be present at the amusement. One man in one day would shoot
fifty pheasants which had eaten up the food of half-a-dozen human
beings. One fox afforded in one day amusement to two hundred
sportsmen, and was--or more generally was not--killed during the
performance. And the fox during his beneficial life had eaten no
corn, nor for the most part geese,--but chiefly rats and such like.
What infinitesimal sum had the fox cost the country for every man who
rushed after him? Then, what had been the cost of all those pheasants
which one shooting cormorant crammed into his huge bag during one
day's greedy sport?

But it was the public nature of the one amusement and the thoroughly
private nature of the other which chiefly affected him. In the
hunting-field the farmer