doubt, in its right place, but running riot over the whole of British sportsmanship in the spirit of the muscular creed of Blair," a girding-up of the loins of all swift runners, from the Bible to our modern Marathon, a contest between Briton and Greek, a contest, for choice, of any sort.

Unduly to deprecate, on the other hand, this combative spirit in sport is to ignore the fact that to it we are indebted for those men of action to whom, for all their lack of the silken arts of diplomacy, a generation grown a little weary of words is apt to turn with relief. It is difficult, if not impossible, to follow the life of that grand old sportsman, Sir Claude De Crespigny," without a feeling of envy for his opportunities and of admiration for his grasp of them, and for not merely his lack of physical fear-that, thank goodness, is still no rare distinctionbut for a hunger for danger in every form, which must be almost unique. When a man in sight of seventy owns that he is still sowing his wild oats, superior folk may sneer, but others will wish that they also might still, so far along life's road, find something else than Dead Sea fruit growing by the wayside. The lust for peril, which is

old sportsman dying a centenarian in his bed. Meanwhile, he stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries as the type of man that fought at Crécy and Agincourt, or against the mailed paynim of Palestine, men on whose unreasoning prowess the fate of an empire might, in that old-time warfare, have hung in some moment when

Theirs but to do and die!

Of equally passionate temperament, though with a colder mistress, are the great Arctic explorers of the past four centuries, who, undaunted by danger or difficulty, follow the call into the wilderness of ice, attacking the dread ful problems of Polar research again and again, turning failure to success, till at length they win their splendid goal. Surely, for all the elaboration of his equipment, the seeker after the Poles is the apotheosis of the simple life! That lure of the North, well-nigh incredible to us softer men, who prefer to work and play in the milder middle latitudes, beckons these noble adventurers with a compelling voice that they obey with a dare-devil alacrity that cannot but fill us, not perhaps with any immediate desire to emulate their

be a fatal blemish in a leader of men, but Sir Claude De Crespigny never sought to be a leader of men, and so, after a long series of hairbreadth escapes, steeplechasing, ballooning, swimming the Nile Rapids, with other short cuts to eternity-he even, on one occasion, proffered his services as picador in a Cuban bullring-no one will feel surprised that he should still look eagerly forward to a supreme bid for deSince struction in a flying-machine.

to be cautious is often to court disaster, his friends will hope that there is a reasonable probability of this reckless

Guy Thorne: "The Race Before Us." 6"Forty Years of a Sportsman's Life."

with admiration not unmixed with envy. As the last and greatest of them says:

The lure of the North! It is a strange and a powerful thing. More than once I have come back from the great frozen spaces, battered and worn and baffled, sometimes maimed, telling myself that I had made my last journey thither, eager for the society of my kind, the comforts of civilization, and the peace and serenity of home. But, somehow, it was never many months before the old restless feeling came over me. Civilization began to lose its zest for me. I began to long for the great white desolation, the battle of the ice and the gales, the long, long, Arctic night, the long,

long Arctic day the silence and vastness of the great, white, lonely North.""

How splendidly the man who worships Nature at her coldest emerges from his ordeal! His contempt for effect prevents Commander Peary from doing himself justice in the limelight, yet there could not have been one among those of us who listened to his lecture at the Albert Hall last summer, but went away feeling better for having been under that majestic dome with the man who had discovered the Pole. It is quite futile to deprecate Arctic exploration as a merely sensational enterprise that panders to the popular craving for excitement, and aims at the solution of some purely academic problems of mathematical geography. Such criticism trails the slime of molluscs. It may be that nothing would induce me to adventure my person on the Northern ice, but I will not, because unequal to such reckless traffic, fail of unstinted admiration for those who take it as part and parcel of the day's work.

Not amid those scenes shall we find the bucolic simplicity of such neatherds as were loved of Theocritus and Bion. Indeed, in all our modern outdoor prose we must garner diligently for a meagre harvest of pure Nature worship unadulterated by ulterior motive, whether of taking life, excavating the buried monuments of antiquity, or peeping behind the ranges to gratify that inborn curiosity which finds attraction only in things unseen. The poets, wherever they may be in hiding, no doubt preserve the sacred flame, but most open-air literature is not moulded in verse. By a policy that seems irony on the part of the publishers, but that is doubtless dictated by sound commercial principles, our tables are buried deepest under this kind of literature at the very sea'Robert E. Peary: "The North Pole."

LIVING AGE. VOL. L.

8

un

son when outdoor England is least attractive. Since Richard Jeffries was silent, there is in our midst but one patient historian of that quiet pastoral life of England, undisturbed in only one or two isolated districts by the scream of the locomotive, and moved by the hurry of machinery. Mr. W. H. Hudson, who has lived on the rolling pampas and known the majesty of the South American forest, still finds his heart's delight in the unequalled loneliness of Salisbury Plain (or of those few acres of it still unpatrolled by the War Office), and in the infinitesimally small sees the infinitely great. In such backwaters, far from the madding crowd, Saxon shepherds still lead their colorless lives, and it is good to read of them, not, indeed, as a new holiday sensation for tourists with kodaks, but as picturesque figures in the unfolding scroll of English history. In Palestine and in Syria I have encountered nomad Bedawin, with their flocks, who might have stepped right out of a page of Old Testament history, but Mr. Hudson has no need to go so far afield, for here, in the enduring Wiltshire uplands, he shows us men still living as Laban lived and Jacob. For it seems that this pastoral life is the one unchanging social factor, untouched even by modern agricultural machinery, and but insensibly affected by the formidable competition of other muttons from overseas. Sheep pasture may turn to ploughland, or may even, alas! be converted into rabbit warrens, and the old barrows and other survivals of Druid Britain may be removed; but the shepherd is an eternal type, and round his unpretentious life, with its unromantic toil and simple nature lore, a sympathetic writer is able to weave such a restful tale as may well bring envy to the hearts of some compelled to keep watch and ward beside the mills that grind.

8 "A Shepherd's Life."

For those, in fact, who crave a little grace from the fret of cities, who yearn honestly and not as a pose, to go back to Mother Nature to be purified, there is no need to cross the seas, for this England has wonderful solitudes to satisfy the most fastidious taste. The pilgrim to Nature's shrine may spend long days on the downs or amid the woods and water-meadows, lost in admiration of the untiring swift, or gay fritillary, or leaping salmon, or insolent dragonfly. Or, as a change from this feast of movement, he may rest his tired eyes on the magic moods of the water-color days of spring, or on the tints of earth new turned by the ploughshare. may listen to the undersong of little birds and marvel at the nest of the long-tailed titmouse. In short, the pageant of the seasons in our English woods has something to suit every taste during stolen hours of idleness and sunshine.

He

Among those who seek holiday respite in the wilds, with a horizon unbounded by chimney-pots, hunters of big game are conspicuous, and it is to be regretted that the broader objects of their foray on the forest primeval are often lost sight of in its more sensational aspect, the shooting of trophies by the class somewhat contemptuously referred to by Sir Frederick Treves as the "Tartarin school." Unfortunately, there is sound ground for his indictment, yet it would not apply to many who have achieved the fame of Nimrod.

Genuine roughing it, on the other hand, as Gordon Cumming roughed it in an Africa that knew not railroads, is an all but lost enjoyment, indulged in by the majority of present-day travellers only in a plausible imitation of the real thing within safe distance of civilization. The cynically minded may perhaps ask whether the mighty hunters of other times would have roughed it from inclination as they did 9 G. A. B. Dewar: "The Airy Way."

from necessity, or whether, given the choice, they too would not have gone out into the jungle with an elaborate camping outfit, a battery of infallible weapons, and a retinue of camp followers worthy of a Roman emperor's triumph. Yet such doubt of them is beside the mark. The fact remains that the hardships of Africa in the eighteen-'sixties and earlier did not keep them at home, and it is the unpretentious simplicity of their outfit which lends their records much of the charm that they still possess for some who cannot read the more sumptuous chronicles of their later epigoni without a slight feeling of disgust that the business should have been made so simple for a deep purse.

This

It is, to do them justice, evident that some of our living hunters of big game are fully alive to this blemish on their scutcheon. Few who, knowing him personally, read Mr. Roosevelt's story of his African journey will fail to realize in more than one passage his impatience of the artificial ordering of his itinerary, which was, no doubt, unavoidable in the case of a public man of first importance in his own country, where his political enemies were trading on his absence, while his supporters were eager for his safe return. necessity he must have realized himself, yet there was ever that lively regret that he too might not be free to lose himself in those alluring wilds, to dance aimlessly to the pipes of Pan, to face the tremendous odds of hostile Nature unaided, and all but unaccompanied, even as Selous had done forty years earlier. Even to "an elderly man with a varied past which includes rheumatism," there is, if he be the right type of elderly man, a fierce joy in wander ing in the virgin jungle, and there were days, clean of slaughter, on which this strenuous statesman, with never a thought for the ceremony of the White House or for the intrigues of trusts,

surrendered unconditionally to the spell of little streams meandering feebly through all but impenetrable papyrus, and waterfalls playing their running accompaniment to the chatter of monkeys in the trees overhead. And I am as certain of this as I can be of anything, that when, in the inexorable march of American politics, he is once more at the White House, where I remember him some years back, he will, in the thick of the fight he loves so well, look back with more than a little regret to those golden days and silver nights in the highlands of East Africa. Not even will his memories recoil from treks across the "Thirst," for did they not lead the way to the sweet peace of evening camp, where the men eased their backs, lit the fires, and prepared the evening meal, and to the cooler march through the pale moonlight and into the reddening dawn, when the sun flamed over the edge of the world and the morning air was filled with the barking of the jackal and the wailing of plovers? If, as I think, much of the charm of the simple life lies in its contrast to the complexity of cities, what finer playground could a modern citizen pray for as the scene of his open air rest cure than that wondrous region where, with snow piled high under the Equator, he may wander, as it were, through arrested scenes of the late Pleistocene, picturing himself, with a little pleasant exercise of the imagination, a comfortable contemporary of the Glacial Period!

Elsewhere the pilgrim, dancing to the pipes of Pan, may find his ideal in the Christmas fairyland of an Indian jungle, or on the rolling pampas of South America, or in the tremendous silence of Canadian backwoods." India is commonly associated with a deadly climate, but there is perfection in mid

10 Stebbing: "Jungle Byways in India." 11 Hesketh-Prichard: "Hunting Camps in Woods and Wilderness."

winter in view of the snow-capped mountains that rise out of foothills clad in sal forest, scarred with watercourses and standing in a sea of grass, through which the huge elephant paddles, sending up gorgeous peafowl at every step. It is easy for a man seated in the howdah to imagine himself looking down from the spar deck of some great liner ploughing her way through summer seas and sending the flying fish up before her advancing bow. For the sportsman with the freedom, official or otherwise, of the Indian wilderness, there are tiger and panther and horned trophies unending, but he who attaches more importance to unusual surroundings than to the bag, who sets little store by trophies and much by new ground, may prefer the Patagonian pampas, with their monotonous dress of dwarfed califaté thorn, a dreary yet haunting type of scenery, the haunt of pumas, wild cattle, guanacos, and rheas, and home of the tall Tehuelche Indian, who still hunts with the boleadores in preference to firearms. In those regions the sportsman may chase the horned guemal, a deer of the Cordilleras, and watch the noble condor sail over abysses of the higher Andes. If, however, he should, with the Arabs, deem solitude better than bad company, there is more to be said for the wilds of Labrador, where a man may hunt caribou and listen to the sunset cry of the loon on the darkening waters, understanding, perchance, why the Indian doubted whether Paradise could be better than the land of the musk-ox in summer, "when the lakes are sometimes blue, and the loons cry often." there are, for another playground, the illimitable woods of New Brunswick, where, last summer, I watched the ungainly moose thrust its great Roman nose through the screen of young birch and shamble along the muddy banks of salmon rivers to feed on tender lily-pads in quiet backwaters. The caribou and

Or

man's wanderings, but his abiding memories will rather be of the forest frame in which he found them. Yet, for all the attraction of other continents in either hemisphere, the spell of Africa never loses its potency, and, of all its mighty rivers, the Nile holds men thrall in a bondage almost unholy. As a recent writer confesses: "But before I left, the spirit of the great river god entered me, and I loved it. . . . If drinking of the Trevi fountain brought me back to Rome, surely, O Father Nile, I have drunk enough of your lifegiving waters from source to mouth to bring me back to your broad bosom!" 12 Yet, for all the witchery of the soft tropic night, with a great moon silvering the sea of grass, for all the majesty of those mighty African rivers, the muddy banks of which breed insects whose bite is death, there is in that scenery something missing for those who have the pagan worship of the renascence of a northern spring. The splendor of tropical Africa is unchanging. Its flowers bloom, its birds sing, throughout the year. There is a surfeit of life and color and movement. There is no death and no awakening, nothing, in short, of the memories which made the exiled poet cry

Oh, to be in England now that April's there!

Rather, for such stimulating ebb and flow in the animal and vegetable world must we stay at home, finding seasonable delight in the peace of rugged Scotch hills white with the first touch of winter, or in the purple moorland radiant in the blaze of summer, in the dazzle of April sunshine on a mountain loch, or in the rush of a great river that refuses to freeze on its way through a Christmas-tree land deep in snow. Such changing scenes, to which may be

12 Major Comyn: "Service and Sport in the Sudan."

tumn evening beside some hanging wood, when a weak sunset floods the russet beeches and sombre firs, are well described by Mrs. Murray of Elibank,13 who, though a keen sportswoman, contemptuous of the imputation in Juvenal's sixth satire, is, before all things, a worshipper of Nature, for whom more than half the charm of fishing is in the music of the river, whether the seductive whisper of some quiet chalk stream or the deeper boom of the storied Tweed. Such sympathy with her surroundings will reconcile even a fastidious woman to the horrors of worm-fishing, for it is inconceivable that a miserable mess of little brown trout should suffice to lure her out of doors into the glory of hill and heather, could she not hear the defiant cry of the grouse or see the dim forms of deer on the skyline.

This conviction, that to catch fish is not all of fishing, but is a means rather than an end, an excuse for spending halcyon days in the open, faring frugally, working strenuously, all but losing sight of the result in the fierce joy of striving to attain it, comes borne to most of us sooner or later. I can write of this dispassionately, and with something like authority, after having, during the past five years, travelled some forty thousand miles in pursuit of a fish I have not yet succeeded in catching. That a more perfect spirit of contentment would possess me, had I accomplished what I attempted on four separate journeys to the other ends of the earth, I may not deny, but I do not doubt but I would cheerfully set out again to-morrow, hoping, like Peary, to succeed at last. That indifferent fishermen should occasionally insist on the secondary importance of their catch of fish is a matter of entertainment to their cynical friends, but it is comforting to find an expert," whose skill and 13 "Echoes of Sport."

14 H. T. Sheringham: "An Open Creel."