aurels. It is an
advantage which the English have over us that in all classes they take
great interest in every form of sport. It may be that they are richer
than we, or it may be that they are more idle: but I was surprised when
I was a prisoner in that country to observe how widespread was this
feeling, and how much it filled the minds and the lives of the people. A
horse that will run, a cock that will fight, a dog that will kill rats,
a man that will box--they would turn away from the Emperor in all his
glory in order to look upon any of these.

I could tell you many stories of English sport, for I saw much of it
during the time that I was the guest of Lord Rufton, after the order
for my exchange had come to England. There were months before I could be
sent back to France, and during this time I stayed with this good Lord
Rufton at his beautiful house of High Combe, which is at the northern
end of Dartmoor. He had ridden with the police when they had pursued
me from Princetown, and he had felt toward me when I was overtaken as
I would myself have felt had I, in my own country, seen a brave and
debonair soldier without a friend to help him. In a word, he took me to
his house, clad me, fed me, and treated me as if he had been my brother.
I will say this of the English, that they were always generous enemies,
and very good people with whom to fight.

In the Peninsula the Spanish outposts would present their muskets at
ours, but the British their brandy-flasks. And of all these generous men
there was none who was the equal of this admirable milord, who held out
so warm a hand to an enemy in distress.

Ah! what thoughts of sport it brings back to me, the very name of High
Combe! I can see it now, the long, low brick house, warm and ruddy, with
white plaster pillars before the door. He was a great sportsman, this
Lord Rufton, and all who were about him were of the same sort. But you
will be pleased to hear that there were few things in which I could
not hold my own, and in some I excelled. Behind the house was a wood in
which pheasants were reared, and it was Lord Rufton's joy to kill these
birds, which was done by sending in men to drive them out while he and
his friends stood outside and shot them as they passed. For my part, I
was more crafty, for I studied the habits of the bird, and stealing out
in the evening I was able to kill a number of them as they roosted in
the trees. Hardly a single shot was wasted, but the