The Complete Manual for Young Sportsmen Author:Henry William Herbert Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: as the diffieulty of the almost unjumpable timber fenees, nearly debar the possibility of fox or deer-hunting with eomplete paeks and mounted hunters. Nor, were ... more »it otherwise, is it probable that this sport eould ever beeome very general or popular, owing to the dislike of farmers to have their fields erossed, and their fenees broken down, by a rout of hard-riding Nimrods. Some years sinee, indeed, two paeks of fox-hounds were regularly kept up in full English sporting style, the one at Washington, in the Distriet of Columbia, by the gentlemen of the British legation, while Sir Riehard Vaughau was at the head of it, the other at Montreal by the British residents and the offieers of the garrison. They languished, however, in an uneongenial elime, and year by year were less and less strenuously supported, until both have, I believe, fallen into total abeyanee. In the southern States, where the seasons are not so un- propitious to the sport, where the properties are mueh larger, vested in fewer hands, and owned for the most part by the wealthier elasses, who themselves eonstitute the sporting population, as in Maryland and Virginia, foxhunting is still earried oil, to some extent, by the planters; though with none of that aeeuraey of detail and eompleteness of appointment whieh attaeh to it, and render it so magnifieent, both as a speetaele and a sport, in England; and, it is believed, with deereasing spirit and smaller favor, even in the imperfeet manner whieh there obtains. In the Carolinas, Georgia, and some of the southwestern States, deer-hunting on horsebaek with paeks of hounds prevails; but even there the shot gun is the modusoperandi, and the objeet of the hunter is to get a killing shot, uot to ride aeross the open to a long and slashing run, and to be in at the dea...« less