Sport in Eastern Persia

1 20 By Mountain, Lake, and Plain
It may be, however, that his spirit still roams
over his old hunting-grounds, the sweeping plains
and jagged hills of Persia ; and if so, with what
feelings, I wonder, does he look down on the
modern sportsman, armed with Koss and Mann-
licher ? I hope, notwithstanding all, he will for-
give us. We may well alter the old apothegm
and say, " Sport is long, life short." Conditions
change, but the spirit of the game remains the
same. The sportsmen we know now existed
even in those ancient times. There are historic
instances of the jealous shot. We read how the
nephew of Odnathus of Palmyra presumed to
dart his javelin in front of his uncle and met
with trouble of an orientally unpleasant kind.
The Emperor Jehangir was a " big bag man."
According to his own memoirs, he killed 17,188
makes perfect." The king, incensed at being thus damned with
faint praise (the babus improved version is "praised with faint
damns "
!), banished the lady to a distant part. Not to be beaten,
she there evolved a plan. Selecting a young calf, she practised
carrying it about. As the calf grew in size, the lady's strength
increased, so that some years later, when the king on one of his
expeditions saw a woman carrying about a full-sized cow with
apparent ease, he stopped to ask what made her "so awfully
clever." Then her toil was rewarded, and she archly replied,
"Practice makes perfect." The modern novelist, with brutal
realism, would probably have made the monarch pass on with
some such remark as " Bless me, how very droll !
" and leave the
heroine to her exercises. The Persian story, however, ends in the
obvious and orthodox manner.