“No! our’s is not a hunting district. Besides, I haven’t the time for it.”
“You shoot, of course?”
“Oh! I’ve knocked over a grouse or a hare or two. But, to tell the truth, I am no sportsman. When I go on the moors I’d rather lie down in the sun and admire the view than blaze away at the birds. And as for sport, rather badger a witness than hunt a fox, any day.”
“We can’t all badger a witness,” suggested Eleanor.
“Besides, a fox likes the run as much as the hounds do.”
“So I’ve heard,” conceded Edward; “but never from the lips of Monsieur Reynard. I never heard of a witness enjoying badgering. But, there, I’m no sportsman, only because I can’t get sport conveniently—I’m no sentimentalist.”
“It’s marvellous,” said the Archdeacon, “what a lot of ‘anti-everything’ people there are. You have nothing to do nowadays but declare you like something, and a society is sure to be formed to put it down. There are people who won’t smoke, or drink a glass of good wine, or honest beer, or eat flesh meat, or play a hand at whist, or go near a racecourse, or handle a gun, or touch a cue. It is Puritanism run mad.”
“They’re generally a set of low Radical Methodists,” opined the Squire. “You never find such absurd fads among Church people.”
“Of course not,” agreed the Archdeacon. “All the same,” demurred Edward, “I don’t see the connection between sound doctrine and roast beef, or between Church polity and a hand at whist.”
“It’s a mental habit, my dear sir,” explained the cleric. “A man begins by dissenting from the Church of his fathers, and by a natural process begins to question their diet.”