“Hard on the poor hounds!” smiled my friend.  “Even worse than a red herring.  You could hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for Actaeon and tore him to pieces.”

“And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better satisfied.”

“Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of their sport is not the cruel delight of pursuing a living thing to its death, that American plan should serve all the purposes, and give all the satisfaction for which they claim to follow the hounds:  the keen pleasure of a gallop across country, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and pride of taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the pleasure of watching the hounds cleverly at work with their mysterious gift of scent.  All the same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame substitute.  Without something being killed, the zest, the ‘snap,’ is gone.  It is as depressing as a sham fight.”

“Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in human history!  Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it.  Men are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be killed themselves, or see something else killed.  Tennyson’s ’ape and tiger’ die very hard in the tamest of us.”

“Alas, indeed they do!” said my friend with a sigh.  “But I do believe that they are dying none the less.  Just of late there has been a reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists.  But reaction is one of the laws of advance.  Human progress always takes a step backwards after it has taken two forward.  And so it must be here too.  In the end, it is the highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from the infliction of pain.  When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or so-called heretics—­how every one thought it the natural and proper thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same race—­and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in human nature.  I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will be unknown.  The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals.  But, of course, I am a dreamer,” he concluded, his face shining with his gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar.