“Well, I have hunted as a boy,” he said, “and I know something of what those red-coated gentlemen are feeling.  But soon I got more interested in studying nature than killing it, and when I became a naturalist I ceased to be a hunter.  You get to love the things so that it seems like killing little children.  They come so close to you, are so beautiful and so clever; and sometimes there seems such a curious pathos about them.  How any one can kill a deer with that woman’s look in its eyes, I don’t know.  I should always expect the deer to change into a fairy princess, and die in my arms with the red blood running from her white breast.  And pigeons, too, with their soft sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the sudden lapping of sleepy wings round the chimneys—­how can any one trap or shoot them with blood-curdling rapidity, and not expect to see ghosts!”

“Of course, there is this difference about the fox,” I said, “that it is really in a sense born to be hunted.  For not only is it a fierce hunter itself, but it would not be allowed to exist at all, so to say, unless it consented to being hunted.  Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable living for a certain time, on condition of its providing at last a spirited exhibition of dying.  In other words, it is preserved entirely for the purpose of being hunted.  It must accept life on that condition or be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plundered farmer.  Life is sweet, after all, and to be a kind of protected highwayman of the poultry-yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking one’s chances of being surely brought to book at last, may perhaps seem worth while.”

“Yes! but how does your image of the protected gladiator reflect on those who protect him?  There, of course, is the point.  The gladiator, as you say, is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat living and idleness, as long as he lives.  You may even say that his profession is good for him, develops fine qualities of mind even as well as body—­but what of the people who crowd with blood-thirsty eagerness to watch those qualities exhibited in so tragic a fashion for their amusement?  Do they gain any of his qualities of skill and courage, and strength and fearlessness in the face of death?  No, they are merely brutalized by cruel excitement—­and while they applaud his skill and admire his courage, they long most to watch him die.  So—­is it not?—­with our friend the fox.  The huntsman invariably compliments him on his spirit and his cunning, but what he wants is—­the brush.  He wants the excitement of hunting the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen say what they will about the exhilaration of the horse exercise across country as being the main thing, they know better—­and, if it be true, why don’t they take it without the fox?”

“They do in America, as, of course, you know.  There a man walks across country trailing a stick, at the end of which is a piece of cloth impregnated with some pungent scent which hounds love and mistake for the real thing.”