Ladies in the Field: Sketches of Sport

PREFACE.
It is scarcely necessary nowadays to offer an apology for sport, with its entrancing excitement, its infinite variety of joys and interests. Women cheerfully share with men, hardships, toil and endurance, climb mountains, sail on the seas, face wind and rain and the chill gusts of winter, as unconcernedly as they once followed their quiet occupations by their firesides. The feverish life of cities too, with its enervating pleasures, is forgotten and neglected for the witchery of legitimate sport, which need not be slaughter or cruelty. Women who prefer exercise and liberty, who revel in the cool sea breeze, and love to feel the fresh mountain air fanning their cheeks, who are afraid neither of a little fatigue nor of a little exertion, are the better, the truer, and the healthier, and can yet remain essentially feminine in their thoughts and manners. They may even by their presence refine the coarser ways of men, and contribute to the gradual disuse of bad language in the hunting field, and to the adoption of a habit of courtesy and kindness. The duties of the wife of the M. F. H. fully bear out this view.
When women prove bright and cheerful companions, they add to the man's enjoyment and to the enlarging of their own practical interests. When, in addition, they endeavour to love Nature in her serenest and grandest moods, to snatch from her mighty bosom some secrets of her being, to study sympathetically the habits of birds, beasts and flowers, and to practise patience, skill, ingenuity and self-reliance, they have learnt valuable lessons of life.
Lastly, in the words of a true lover of art: The sportsman who walked through the turnip fields, thinking of nothing but his dog and his gun, has been drinking in the love of beauty at every pore of his invigorated frame, as, from each new tint of autumn, from every misty September morning, from each variety of fleeting cloud, each flash of light from distant spire or stream, the unnoticed influence stole over him like a breeze, bringing health from pleasant places, and made him capable of clearer thoughts and happier emotions.