ROYAL SPORT.* IN about a dozen slender chapters, illustrated with
excellent amateur snapshots, the. German Crown Prince has published some " pages taken from the hunting diary of a man who loves open-air sport." The occasional baldness of the English must be naturally attributed to the translator and not to the royal author, who, however, describes his exploits with all the zest and simplicity of a schoolboy. In a modest introduction the Crown Prince disarms both sporting and literary-critics : "My hand is more used to, and more skilled in the use of, bridle, rifle, and alpenstock • than the pen, and only the con- sciousness that I have enjoyed many hunting experiences which fall but to the lot of few has induced me to offer this little book to sportsmen."
In the chapters which follow there are short accounts of various days after elephants in Ceylon ; tigers, pigs and black- buck in India ; ibex in the King of Italy's famous preserve ; roe-deer in Silesia ; and chamois in the forest of Bregenz. Days of comparative failure are mixed with days in which the sportsmen return exultant to quench their thirst in whisky and soda, champagne, or port wine. To the English reader no part of the book will prove more entertaining than the two short chapters on grouse. Here the manners and customs of a Scottish castle, the gardenias for the button-hole, and the costumes of the women are touched on with amusing freshness. The Crown Prince seems to have found driven grouse the hardest game to kill he ever shot at. In all the chapters, but especially in those on the Indian tour, gratitude towards his hosts and all those who have pro- vided sport is manifest. The Crown Prince felt strongly the call of the East, and is clearly a true lover of wild nature. After pages in which, as we have said, the sport is described with a boyish and even crude simplicity, the reader will come in the concluding chapter on the following more serious passage: "The sense of one's own insignificance and nothing- ness, as compared to the eternal boundless grandeur of Nature, in the sight of the marvellous works of our Creator— by whatever name He is called—the moments of leisure when one has opportunity to dream and to reflect dreams, in alter- nation with honest exertion and strain on both mind and body in outwitting the wild ; these are sensations with which no one is so familiar as the true sportsman."
• From My Hunting Day-Book. By H.I. and B.H. the Crown Prince of the German Empire and of Prussia. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [Gs. net.]
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