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island circled by a sea of clauber, passing muster for a cover. My lower habiliments had by this time surrendered all claims to distinction; and if I had been offered all Lombard-street for it, I could not have pointed out where my breeches ended and my boots began. All at once a dozen men from as many different quarters sang out 'tallyho,' to the accompaniment of a storm of hail and rain, which, while it helped to soften the crust of the dirt-pie, turned all the blood in the body into ice. It looked, however, like business; so, thrusting my gloves into my pocket, I spat upon my hands, and girt up my loins like a gentleman. Presently pug bolted, and for a couple of hours or so we ran him up and down one lane, over head and ears and everything in filth-it must have been the same, for two such passages for man and beast never existed in hell or Connaught. We finished after dark, without a kill; but I can aver, of my own knowledge, that had it lasted a very little longer, there would have been a death to record." Kent was never classed among the metropolitan counties; and Essex, although liberally supplied with hounds, is no longer in the category. The glories of the home country-at best never particularly brilliant-are fast on the wane, just at the time we had learnt to be indifferent about it. Mr. Grantley Berkeley used to run into his venison in Russell-square: now the fashion is to wait till after it's cooked, for such achievements in that part of the world. The royal hounds made a point of finishing their runs over the Harrow country at the top of Portland-place-as late as the season before last....It was time we changed the triumphal whoo-whoop procal o procal from the echoes of the New Road, and the ears of those who promenade Regentstreet. All things are good or bad according to circumstances. The wife of parson Adams, the best model of a Christian divine yet attempted by the pen, used to tell her husband it was wicked to talk of religion out of church. To use a common expression, London has now gone out of town: it is not meet it should encounter a pack of hounds on its journey. Anon there will be a close of the metropolitan hunting session-for ever and for aye. This can be a cause neither of regret or inconvenience, since the steam-roads have brought the Quorn, the Belvoir, and the Pytchley to our stable-doors. In return, however, for these good things, let men remember gratitudelet them be considerate and forbearing in their treatment of those blessings of the virgin goddess: let it never be said profanely of those who avail themselves of the green fields of Northampton, and the noble sport of the squire of Sulby

"The pleasure they delight in physics PAYNE."

THE OTTER.

ENGRAVED BY J. SCOTT, FROM A PAINTING BY E. B. SPALDING.

The march of civilization, population, cultivation, and a few more "nation" advantages of that sort, has given to many of our sports a somewhat anomalous and contradictory character. The stag for example, as the title of the companion plate shows, is hunted to be rescued rather than destroyed; and though, to be sure, the fox is con

demned to die the death of the chased, still he is preserved for that very purpose. To the execution by the trigger, too, the term " preserve" becomes yet more applicable; while the provision of stout and strong hares for the gaze-hound, is made on much the same system of keeping and killing for exclusive customers. In fact, to almost every bird or beast one remove above vermin, a certain code of fairplay law is allowed; and so if it be considered a fine feat to bag he, she, or it, by some amount of skill in hunting, shooting, or coursing, care is taken that the species suffer by few other means. Thus "the whirring pheasant," who rises mid-day at the beck and for the sport of my lord of the manor, has his remedy against the assassin-like attack of the poacher. Madam puss, who stretches her long legs and points her long ears in her two-to-one scurry for life and the cup, finds an equally equitable claim against wires and snares: and bold reynard, the fox, who fights it out" openly" with hounds, asserts a glorious freedom from all the machinations of traps, drugs, and shots.

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To every rule there is generally an exception, and the grand one here we take to be the case of our epicurian acquaintance" the otter." We have otter hounds and otter hunting, and the pursuit classed amongst the acknowledged sports of this country; and yet who ever heard of an otter preserver? Here our sportsman really does appear to sally forth fully impressed with the old-fashioned notion that he will taste blood if possible, because it will be to the good of his district to have such a despoiler destroyed. It is nearly as much a matter of necessity as of inclination, and so any one particular agency in effecting the end is scarcely ever very strictly adhered to. We cannot imagine that in the most barbarous or woodland of countries, our worthy neighbour, Mr. Snapshot, of Powder'em Hall," would paragraph himself as "having, on the morning of Monday last, shot on the side of Beacham Wood one of the finest dog-foxes ever seen." We don't believe that the dullest of country papers would for a moment hazard such an insertion; and yet only mark the difference between fox-hunting and otter-hunting. It was only the last month of all months that we immortalized one of the wags of Windsor by transplanting a county column of how his triggership had knocked over one of the very largest otters ever seen in the Thames. Every man's hand is against him, that's a fact. If he happen to be out when the otter hounds are out, they hunt him; if when the duck-shooters are abroad, they shoot him; and if when his especial opposition house is at work, they fish him-fix him with a Limerick hook and a wonder fly, and get the ground-work of a story that staggers the compositors as they set it up-or may be haul him out wholesale in a net spread for salmon and such small fishes.

In sober seriousness, his majesty King Otter sadly wants discretion, and takes to tasting and picking when a bare subsistence should be the most he ought to expect. Goes in for as fine a tithe of the salmon as that crack hand, the curate himself; and so produces a scarcity that works on to a sequitur, in his becoming far more than proportionately scarce himself. Otters, indeed, are now rarities in most quarters, and so have we the greater reason for giving the full length portrait of the gentleman-" one of those amphiberous animals," who, as his present position would seem to denote, "can't live in the water, and dies upon land."

SPORTSMEN AND SPORTING MEN.

BY HARRY HIEOVER.

With what different sensations do we commence different undertakings! How irresistibly the mind is swayed by the object it has in view, or by the subject that calls forth its energies, be they of the highest or the most mediocre cast!

How cheerfully the traveller pursues his way (wearied though it be) whose promised goal is the hearth of his childhood, whose anticipated rewards are the smiles and welcome of those so loved and so well remembered! What if he feel a temporary fatigue, his buoyant spirits enable him to throw aside its effects; he feels his star in its ascendant; every trifling incident of the road assumes an unwonted interest to beguile his way; and Hope, that blessed attribute of the mind, sustains his step elastic as when he first set out.

How different the feelings of the unwilling wayfarer, who has no such guerdon for the object of his journey! With measured, heavy tread he plods his solitary way, each step the more hateful as it carries him from scenes on which his heart dwells in fond remembrance, to mix in those from which his mind recoils: so far from wishing to cheat time or distance of their reality, he hails with pleasure every incident that delays his journey.

Something like these feelings actuate the writer, in accordance with the subject he takes up; and he enters on his task with more or less pleasurable feelings, in the same ratio as that subject brings pleasing or unpleasing scenes and images to his mind.

"Ne cede malis, sed contra valentior ito," is all very well in theory, but somewhat hard to practise; if its author found no difficulty in acting up to it, he must have possessed (and I make no doubt but he did) a much stronger mind than mine, or even than that of the generality of mankind.

The actor on the stage, if he possesses a knowledge of his profession, will certainly play a part that he feels much better than one that he does not feel; but still, should he not thus feel it, his tact enables him to judge of the intent of his author, and practice enables him to pourtray sensations he may not participate in: he may imitate a laugh so naturally as to produce real, joyous, and uncontrollable laughter in his audience; and often here, as on the world's wide stage, the actor laughs mechanically when the heart is breaking, while in real or mimic scenes of life I fear the look and tone of anguish and despair are but too often the true portrayal of the feelings. "All the world's a stage ;" and I fear, as that world is constituted, he who plays his part so as to put himself beyond the fear of its powers, whether by justifiable means or the reverse, is the one who will be most praised, most applauded, and most followed-nay, can always command "a full house," and that composed of many of the aristocracy of the kingdom. He need not call up the mimic features of

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