Cruelty of Hunting Considered.
Over the closed eyes, panting flank, and exhausted frame of this tiny, innocent, and yet seduced orphan, who had never known its father, and has just lost its mother, we will venture to offer to our readers a very few remarks on the strange dissolving view that has just vanished, or rather galloped, from their sight.
"It's just," said Andrew Fairservice to Frank Osbaldistone, "amaist as silly as our auld daft laird here and his gomerils o' sons, wi' his huntsmen and his hounds, and his hunting cattle and horns, riding haill days after a bit beast that winna weigh sax punds when they hae catched it."
To the foregoing observation it might also have been added, that in the extraordinary exertions we have described, the pleasures enjoyed by the "bit beast" in being hunted, when compared with those of the two or three hundred animals, human, equine, and canine, that are hunting him, are as disproportionate as is his weight when compared to the sum total of theirs.
"No!" said the haughty Countess of —— to an aged huntsman, who, cap in hand, had humbly invited her ladyship to do him the honour to come and see his hounds, "No! I dislike everything belonging to hunting—it is so cruel."
"Cruel!!" replied the old man, with apparent astonishment, "why, my lady, it can't possibly be CRUEL, for," logically holding up three fingers in succession,
"We all knows that the GENTLEMEN like it,