'218 FOX-HOUND, FOREST, AND PRAIRIE. 



catalogue. And, alas, I keep neither a notebook nor a memory. 

 But here at haphazard, let me throw you a few sample names 

 that at least will convey some guarantee that the faculty of 

 crossing a country was not without its representatives — the 

 Master and Mr. F. Langham, Lord Spencer, Lord Rathdonnell, 

 Captains Soames, Riddell, Beach, Majors Long and Riddell, 

 Messrs. Craven, Foster, Henley, Schwabe, Wroughton, Muntz, 

 Wedge, Graham, Sawbridge, Atherton, Greig, Graham, Home, 

 Dale, Osborne, Fabling, Goodman, &c, &c, and several of the 

 .straight-riding ladies of the Pytchley Hunt. 



There was music in the scream of the galloping whip as it 

 cut across the breeze from his post beneath the covert — for did 

 it not come from the Shuckburgh direction, and did we not fend 

 off all the baser background of rough hilly upland ? The 

 merriest moment of life — a start with foxhounds over a ravish- 

 ing country — had come again. If any man can think of his 

 woes, his debts, his lost opportunities, lost love, or loves, his 

 bitter to-morrow or bis regrettable past — surely he had better 

 withdraw at once from the miserable imposture, confess that his 

 heart is not in the sport, and cling only to late drink and early 

 smoke. The thin chain of white black and tan was already 

 shooting forth from the tangled covert, and glancing over the 

 ant-hilly pasture, swift as minnows across the shallows (an 

 obvious simile in the face of watery trial to come) — ere we 

 had spun down the slope and burst three abreast through the 

 gateway in the hollow. Ridge-and-furrow and ant-hill for 

 forty acres, " all on " — hounds and men — heads straight for the 

 distant hill, no stop nor even a jostle at two low-laid fences, 

 then a dart for the bottom, and water on every man's brain. 

 Where a cross fence runs down to the brook, the rush divided. 

 Right division found the smoother sailing and the brook 

 charmingly amenable. Left were locked in — though only for a 

 brief, anxious, half second — for the thin end of the wedge, in its 

 everyday practical and determined fashion, split the heavy bull- 

 finch, and made light of the water where it ran in a crude and 

 ugly bed. First follower rolled heavily on the further bank, 

 second went down into the depths. Fifty yards up stream it 



