Tally-ho!
Fox-hunting, I maintain, is entitled to be considered one of the fine arts, standing somewhere between music and dancing. For ‘Tally-ho!’ like the favourite evening gun of colonising orators, has been ‘carried round the world.’ The plump mole-fed foxes of the neutral ground of Gibraltar have fled from the jolly cry; it has been echoed back from the rocky hills of our island possessions in the Mediterranean; it has startled the jackal on the mountains of the Cape, and his red brother on the burning plains of Bengal; the wolf of the pine forests of Canada has heard it, cheering on fox-hounds to an unequal contest; and even the wretched dingoe and the bounding kangaroo of ‘Australia have learned to dread the sound.
In our native land ‘Tally-ho!’ is shouted and welcomed in due season by all conditions of men; by the ploughman, holding hard his startled colt; by the woodman, leaning on his axe before the half-felled oak; by bird-boys from the tops of leafless trees; even Dolly Dumpling, as she sees the white-tipped brush flash before her market-cart in a deep-banked lane, stops, points her whip and in shrill treble screams "Tally-ho!"
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