THE

HE news that a mass meeting of animals was to be held in order to protest against the cruelties perpetrated by man under the name of "Sport," sent an electric thrill throughout the length and breadth of the land.

In the glens and on the mountain slopes of the Highlands the great red stags threw up their grand crowned heads and drank in the morning breeze of a new day with a proud feeling of freedom which was fresh to them. The foxes in every shire from John o' Groat's to Land's End breathed more freely. The hares, red, brown, and blue, grew bolder when they heard the news, and that night the "merry brown hare" was merrier than the moon had ever seen him before.

There was a revel in every rabbit warren; and along the cliffs, in the sandhills and the hedgerows, in the gorse and fern brakes, the "bunnies" erked up their hind legs and scampered about wild with the delight of a new hope.

Organisation was something new, so new and startling that the animals seized upon the idea that they had discovered a great mysterious power, which was to make the weak strong and turn wrong into right.

It would be difficult to say exactly how and when this idea of a mass meeting formed shape, but certain it is that it was caught up eagerly, and

some of the leading spirits set to work to make the necessary arrangements.

Where should it be held? and when? There were differences of opinion on these points, but at last Exmoor Forest was chosen.

It did not take long to flash the information over the land; the hares raced hither and thither at night and passed the word from one to the other. The foxes carried the news from earth to earth, and the rabbits stamped outside each other's burrows and screamed down to their friends. Then the birds took it up-at least those birds which knew the animal language, the jays and the magpies, the starlings and the blackbirds, and the rooks and jackdaws-and these flew over the woods and scuttered through the dry leaves in the bramble brakes, and shrieked, chattered, or whistled, until not a creature with four legs but knew all about the great meeting. But these birds, like most chatterers, made mischief, for the rooks and jackdaws were not content until they had told the news to all the sheepdogs on the downs, and the hounds in the kennels at Exford on the Moor, and that brought trouble in the end.

At last the evening arrived. The spot chosen for the meeting was on the northern slope of Dunkery Hill on Exmoor, a hill which runs up with a gradual slope to a height of over 1,700 feet above the sea-level. All through the day the animals who had reached the moor during the previous night lay crouched and resting amidst the deep recesses of Homer Wood or the steep woods of Culbone, which run down from the edge of the moor and almost dip their leaves in the waters of the Bristol Channel.

When the sun had gone down and twilight was

drawing its still grey veil over the rolling moors and throwing the wooded hollows into darkness, then all the animals ventured out and made fearlessly for the appointed trysting place.

CHATTERERS.

The spot was well chosen. From the summit of the hill, on which was piled a huge heap of stones where the beacon fires were wont to be lighted, the eye travelled far and wide over the panorama stretched below and around.

There was the Bristol Channel sweeping to the west to join the Atlantic, and stretching up to the north-east to the Severn mouth, dotted with the little islands of Steep and Flat Holme, lying full five-and-twenty miles distant.

Across the Channel the coast and hills of Wales bounded the horizon like a long dark purple cloud in the deepening twilight. The beautiful wooded hill of Dunster Castle stood out clear and dark against the soft grey background of water. The rich pastures of Somersetshire, the blue range of the Quantocks, and away in the far distance the Gloucestershire hills, were all in view, and immediately around the foot of Dunkery itself were the rolling moorlands of Exmoor Forest, looking like huge Atlantic waves which had changed their nature and rested. And here and there was a silvery gleam of the Badgworthy stream which runs through the land of the Doones.

It was just beneath the beacon on the northern slope of the hill that the crowds of animals grouped themselves, not by any preconcerted arrangement, but rather by natural attraction or aversion one to the other.

The hares and rabbits feared to mix too freely with the foxes, for although their interests were for the time identical, there was no confidence. The larger animals naturally kept together, but the red deer looked down upon the fallow deer with somewhat of contempt; and as for the weasels

and the stoats, there was a general feeling that they were little sneaks who had no right to be at the meeting at all.

So it came about that the animals settled themselves into kindred groups, instead of mixing together in the unanimity of a general purpose. With all this segregation, disorder and confusion might well have been expected when the question arose as to who should preside at the meeting. Fortunately, however, the choice fell instinctively upon a grand old red stag, the patriarch of Exmoor, a noble-looking creature, with antlers gnarled and branching like a pair of sturdy oaks, whose red coat was grizzled with age, but whose eye was as bright and keen as that of any young brocket.

He stepped proudly out from amidst his fellows, took up a position with his back to the beacon, and with swelling nostrils and glistening eyes gazed around him. His appearance was greeted with loud applause; the stags roared, the foxes and otters barked, and the hares and rabbits stamped excitedly, but when he commenced to speak the noise was hushed at once and all the animals listened eagerly.

"Fellow animals!" said the stag. "There is no need for me to tell you why we are here this evening; the cause which has brought us together in a common bond of sympathy is one which lies too close to our hearts ever to be forgotten, for it is branded on us by the fire of cruelty, written on our lives in letters of blood! Is there one animal here amidst all this crowd who has not suffered, either in himself or in the person of some one dear to him, by that brutal pastime which man calls 'sport'? I will not dwell on details which would be painful, and unhappily no details which I could give you could go beyond your experience. The ever-haunting dread which is never absent from us, the desperate race for life, the cruel deaths, the mutilations-all these things fall to our cruel lot. And why?

"Is life less sweet to us, or is death less terrible to us, because we are animals and not men? True we cannot resist the tyranny which crushes us, but does might give right? Man says that we are only animals, that we have no souls and no rights which should be considered when they clash with his interests or his' pleasures; but does he think that because our present life is our only one, as most men say, therefore it matters not how we are treated? Surely if our short life here is our only existence, then, in common justice, we should be allowed to live in peace and to enjoy our brief spell of happiness without being hounded and tortured and killed, simply that man may amuse his spare hours.

"Why should we who are called wild animalswild because we have liberty-why should we be beyond the pale of mercy and of justice? If a labourer lashes his horse too freely, or if a farmer leaves his shorn sheep exposed to the cold, the law steps in and punishes the offender; but the very men who administer that law and who pose with virtuous indignation as defenders of the weak and helpless animals, will the very next day turn out in all the panoply of sport and help to run to death an animal every whit as defenceless

as the horse or the sheep, and the law says nothing! If a lad sets a couple of terriers to worry a cat, he is punished for brutality; but if he joins in setting not two but twenty couples of hounds on to a poor, terrified, screaming hare, he is not a criminal but a sportsman !

"My friends, it is to raise our voices against this cruelty, this injustice, that we have met together this evening. Let us strike a blow for freedom by resolutely declaring that we will not accept this heritage of suffering which man seeks to entail upon us. We are safe for a time from our foes, and I ask you all fearlessly to speak your minds, and by taking counsel together we shall find, beyond a doubt, some means of freeing ourselves from this deadly tyranny of 'sport.'

The conclusion of the stag's speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause, which was renewed again and again. When silence was restored, an excited-looking fox was seen eagerly gesticulating, and the stag called on him to address the meeting. The fox said:

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The burning words which have fallen from the lips of our noble president are the heralds of a new age, which has commenced this day! The glorious Revolution of Animals against the despotism of sport has begun, and it shall not end until we are all free! until the time when the stag may lie in his leafy covert, the fox in his earth, the hare in his form, and the rabbit in the warren, without the dread of the huntsman and his hounds!"

He went on to describe in graphic detail the agony suffered by a hunted creature, and he passionately appealed to all his fellow-animals, great and small, to combine and put an end to man's reign of blood and cruelty.

Then a hare got up and told a piteous tale of the ceaseless persecutions inflicted upon his unhappy race.

"If," said he, "we escape the gun, we have to run the gauntlet of the harriers, or the slower but remorseless death-hunt of the beagles, and for many of us is reserved the awful fate of the race for life with the great, fierce greyhounds straining on either side, and with the terrifying yells of a mob ringing in our ears. We harm no one; why

should we be hounded out of life, as if we had no right to live, or as if we were born with nerves and muscles specially constituted to afford amusement to man ?"

And when the hare finished his speech with a bold and fiery denunciation of the great enemy, "sport," and appealed to the assembly to raise the standard of revolution throughout the country, the applause was long and loud.

The next speaker was a rabbit, who complained that his race, although the smallest and most defenceless of all, suffered beyond all others from the brutalities of man.

Then a fox, whose sly face wore a peculiarly

"I can quite understand," said he, with a smug expression of sympathy, "the tone of resentment and indignation which runs through the eloquent speeches to which we have listened, and I do not deny that there is just ground for resentment, for to be shot, or trapped, or hunted, are unpleasant incidents; but, my friends, passion and indignation, however justifiable in individuals, are not always the safest guides for action when great interests are at stake.

"The argument used by previous speakers is a very simple one: 'Some of us suffer from sport, therefore sport is an evil and must be abolished.' But that view is near-sighted in the extreme, and betrays an ignorance of one of the leading principles of nature, by showing anxiety for the single life and an utter disregard for the type.

"Sport is, I allow, destructive to the individual, but it is preservative to the masses. If it were not for man's code of sport, which preserves the many so that he may kill the few, how long should we be permitted to exist?

"The barriers and restrictions by which our destruction is limited would then be broken down, and our lives would be at the mercy of every man. Abolish sport, and you abolish the only claim for life which man grants to us! Abolish sport, and we shall either sink to the mercenary level of food, or die out of the land as surely as the wolf and the wild boar have disappeared.

"And is there no exaggeration in the tales of suffering told us to-night? Have not the stags and the hares their merry moonlit nights, when men are in their beds and the hounds in their kennels, and there is nothing to molest them? And the fallow deer!-what have they to complain of?

"They spend their lives in the parks as free from care or molestation as the cattle in the mea

dows, and surely sport does not affect them!

"And, again, what have the deer who are hunted from the cart to complain of? They know that there is no danger in the chase; they run their round, and are taken home as surely and as safely as the hounds themselves, and it must be enjoyment and not pain to them. As for my little friends the rabbits, they may not, perhaps, always look at things in the same light that we foxes do, but they cannot deny that the many happy hours which they enjoy during the day in the quiet retirement of their domestic circles, and in the gloaming and the darkness amongst the ferns and in the fields, must more than recompense them

for any slight inconvenience to which they may at times be subject."

The fox was unable to proceed any further, for the angry protests and the indignant cries of the animals around him drowned his voice; and, at last, seeing the threatening temper of the crowd, he stopped abruptly, and slipping amongst his fellow-foxes, he quietly stole away out of sight.

The old stag in the meantime had come to the front, and begged the meeting to be patient.

"It is well for us to hear both sides of a question, although I am bound to say that there appeared to me to be more sophistry in the fox's arguments than sympathy with the sufferings of his fellow-animals. As for the statement which he made, that the carted deer enjoy being hunted, I am quite sure that it will be refuted by some one amongst us who can speak from experience. There is one of my race here who bears the brand of the tyranny of sport, his head being shorn of that crown of staghood which it is our right to carry, and I am quite sure we shall all be glad to hear what he has to say on the subject."

In response to this invitation, a stag, who had been standing near the outskirts of the crowd, pushed his way to the front. He was a fine, handsome creature, but his antlers had been sawn off close to his head, giving him a somewhat feminine appearance, and his eyes lacked the fire and life which sparkled from the eyes of his free brethren.

He commenced by saying that he felt ashamed to stand before his fellows without the attire which it was the birthright of every free-born stag to wear. "The fox who spoke just now told you that we carted deer enjoy being hunted, but I would like to ask him whether, if he wished for exercise, he would not prefer to take it in his own way rather than by having a pack of hounds thirsting for his blood tearing at his heels? The best way in which I can refute that monstrous statement will be by telling you what occurred to a friend of mine, a fellow-slave in a county not far from London and not very long ago. He was captured, and for a time well fed and cared for, except that he was kept in confinement. But on one Easter Monday morning he was seized, and his antlers were sawn off close to his head. Perhaps the fox will tell you that this is an enjoyable operation; he can realise for himself whether it is so or not by getting some one to saw his teeth off close to the gums. I can only say, from what my friend has told me, that the pain of the operation was intense; the horrible grating of the saw crashing through the horns thrilled every nerve with the most acute agony. When this cruel mutilation was completed the poor fellow was put into a cart, taken some distance away, and then let loose amongst a mob of people. Then followed the hunt, which, the fox says, affords such pleasure to us. It is all very well to argue that we are not intended to be killed, and that therefore there is no danger. The hounds know nothing of any such arrangement, and we have to struggle for our lives as desperately as the fox himself when he hears the dreaded Tally ho!' It is quite a chance that any one is near enough to the hounds to whip them off before they have dragged the

"But to return to my friend's experiences. He was rescued from the hounds just as he was sinking with exhaustion; then the huntsman strapped his hind and fore legs together, and he was slung upon a pole and carried by four men for some miles, the fetlock joints of the stag bearing the whole weight of the body. This is only a sample of the cruelty of stag-hunting, and I emphatically deny that we carted deer enjoy being hunted."

Then a wild, scraggy-looking hare got up to speak. His eyes, which were unnaturally large even for a hare, wore a wild, excited expression, and, to add to the grotesqueness of his appearance, he had decorated his head by sticking some dried grass stalks into the fur between his ears. He was greeted with a general laugh, for the March hare was well known for his eccentric and extreme views.

"I hate foxes," he said; "but I prefer a fox who knows what he is talking about, even to a hare who cannot see beyond his own nose, and whose sense of logic is as limited as his tail. The fox was quite right when he told you that if it were not for sport all we animals would be exterminated. As it is now, we know that when we are

killed the operation is carried out in a respectable manner and in accordance with orthodox traditions, but if sport were put an end to we should be exposed to the ill-regulated thirst for blood of every farmlabourer and every poacher who could muster a gun or a trap. And why abuse man in the matter? If men should. cease to exist, how much better off should we be? The dogs from far and near would combine, and we should speedily become staple articles of food for our four-footed enemies, instead of being preserved as we are now from all interference except within certain welldefined limits.

"And there is another consideration which should weigh with us in debating this question of sport, and it is one which appeals particularly tomy fellow-hares. It is this: we boast great powers of speed and endurance, which contribute to our pleasures, and also enable us many a time to escape from our pursuers. My friends, had we never been pursued, these powers which we prize so much would perhaps have never been developed; therefore, instead of putting an end to sport, we should be grateful for its preservative and developing influences."

The speaker was allowed to say no more, for the amusement which his appearance had caused had been succeeded by amazement and indignation as he propounded his strange and unnatural theories. The gradually increasing storm of interruption culminated at last in one unanimous yell of derision, and after gesticulating in dumb show for a few minutes, the March hare disappeared from view.

Several animals jumped up eager to reply, but

precedence was given to another hare who was anxious to repudiate the sentiments of his eccentric kinsman. He denounced the opinions and arguments of the previous speaker with passionate vigour, attributing them to the vagaries of a disordered imagination. "What is the use," he cried, "of wasting our breath in speeches? Let every animal here, this evening, whether horned or hornless, short tailed or long tailed, resolve that he will no longer allow

himself to be a victim for the brutal amusements of man. Let the stag refuse to leave his covert, the fox his earth, the rabbit his burrow, when the sportsman is abroad. We have only to be passive; and if we refuse to fly before the gun and the hounds, man will find his amusement gone

and will leave us unmolested to seek for other prey. This passive policy may entail some sacrifice of life, but the sacrifice will be a noble

one.

"We hares are timid folk, so they taunt us; but we will set the example. I, for one, swear that, whenever I hear the huntsman's horn and the cries of the hounds echoing over the fields, I will sit, dauntless and immovable, wherever I may be. If death comes to me, I will meet it unflinchingly, but I will never fly-"

The hare suddenly paused; his long ears twitched nervously, and then jerked forward as if straining to catch some distant sound; his eyes grew big with terror and stared away into the gloom of the distance. His keen sense of hearing had detected a faint but startling noise. It was coming nearer and nearer, and he knew too well what it wasthe cry of hounds on a hot scent!

With a wild scream the hare turned, and, laying his ears over his back, he went down the hill like a racehorse.

By this time the other animals had also heard the dreaded sounds, which came with terrible distinctness as the hounds rose over the crest of a neighbouring hill. For one instant the crowd stood as if spellbound, with straining eyes and ears, and the next moment there was a flying mass of terrified animals tearing down over the slopes of Dunkery.

Stags, foxes, hares, and rabbits went helter

skelter, each one thinking of nothing but his own. safety.

The otters with their loping gallop hurried away to the nearest stream, and the weasels and stoats slipped in amongst the stones and the heather roots, and lay low.

Only one animal stayed behind, and that was the old stag, who stood with his head thrown proudly up, scorning to fly.

But how did the hounds get here at this time of night, when they ought to have been in their kennels?

It came about through the chattering of those long-tongued birds, the jackdaws, the magpies, and the rest of the talkative crew; they had told the hounds in Exford kennels what was going to be done, and some of the younger dogs had arranged amongst themselves that when they were taken out for exercise that day, as many as possible should get away in different directions, and meeting again at some appointed place in the evening, they should have a hunt all to themselves without being bothered by the horns and whips of Arthur the huntsman and his whippers-in.

Only a dozen of the hounds succeeded in their design, and just when the hare was making his impassioned speech they hit upon the scent of some of the deer, and broke out into a yell of delight which would have done justice to a full pack. They came racing along with the scent breast high, and almost ran into a small mob of rabbits, who in their fright were scuttering in the wrong direction.

The hounds being young and giddy, more than half of them ran riot, and giving up the nobler game dashed after the little fugitives, and next day they sneaked back to the kennels with rabbits' fluff in their jaws, and a sound thrashing they got. Of the rest only two returned, bruised and bleeding, and the bodies of the missing couple were found some days after in the Badgworthy stream. The old stag had waited until they came in view, and then he coolly galloped away until he came to a pool in the Doone Valley, and there he stood up against a granite boulder and faced his enemies. With horns and hoofs he made short work of them, and then he trotted off across the dark moor, brooding over the failure of his hopes. It will be a long time before the animals can organise another meeting.

F. CARRUTHERS GOULD.