As boys grow older to the age of reading they select, or at least love best, those stories of bloodshed and violence.  Stevenson wrote that boys read for some element of the brute instinct in them.  His two wonderful books Treasure Island and Kidnapped are full of fight and the killing of men. Robinson Crusoe is the only great boy’s book I ever read that did not owe its charm to fighting.  But still did not old Crusoe fight to live on his lonely island?  And this wonderful tale is full of hunting, and has at the end the battle with cannibals.

When lads grow up they become hunters, almost without exception, at least in spirit if not in deed.  Early days and environment decide whether or not a man becomes a hunter.  In all my life I have met only two grown men who did not care to go prowling and hunting in the woods with a gun.  An exception proves a great deal, but all the same most men, whether they have a chance or not, love to hunt.  Hunters, therefore, there are of many degrees.  Hunters of the lowly cotton-tail and the woodland squirrel; hunters of quail, woodcock, and grouse; hunters of wild ducks and geese; hunters of foxes—­the red-coated English and the homespun clad American; hunters—­which is a kinder name for trappers—­of beaver, marten, otter, mink, all the furred animals; hunters of deer, cat, wolf, bear, antelope, elk, moose, caribou; hunters of the barren lands where the ice is king and where there are polar bears, white foxes, musk-ox, walrus.  Hunters of different animals of different countries.  African hunters for lion, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo, eland, hartebeest, giraffe, and a hundred species made known to all the world by such classical sportsmen as Selous, Roosevelt, Stewart Edward White.

But they are all hunters and their game is the deadly chase in the open or the wild.  There are hunters who hate action, who hate to walk and climb and toil and wear themselves out to get a shot.  Such men are hunters still, but still not men!  There are hunters who have game driven up to them.  I heard a story told by an officer whom I believe.  In the early days of the war he found himself somewhere on the border between Austria and Germany.  He was invited to a hunt by personages of high degree.  They motored to a sequestered palace in the forest, and next day motored to a shooting-lodge.  At daylight he was called, and taken to the edge of a forest and stationed in an open glade.  His stand was an upholstered divan placed high in the forks of a tree.  His guide told him that pretty soon a doe would come out of the forest.  But he was not to shoot it.  In fifteen minutes a lame buck would come out.  But he was not to shoot that one either.  In ten more minutes another buck would come out, and this third deer he was to kill.  My informant told me this was all very seriously meant.  The gun given him was large enough in calibre to kill an elephant.  He walked up the steps to the comfortable