380 FOX-HOUND, FOREST, AND PRAIRIE. 



of seventeen minutes, might be performed while I was there to 

 see. But in vain I craned my neck from pillow to window — 

 like a young swallow hungering from its nest beneath the 

 eaves — and tightly grasped my wishing ring, in the shape of 

 Tom Firr's old crooked horn that has twanged from Bunker's 

 Hill, been dug from beneath him at the Curate, and has even 

 been taken to scare the jackals on the Nilgiris. The treat was 

 not to be — though it nearly came off. At least three foxes 

 were in the gorse, one of them set off for Flecknoe and the 

 side-hill that slopes from Shuckburgh, and they were within an 

 ace of showing me a point-to-point that would have warmed 

 my blood better than the Run of the Season in a plough 

 country. The village stands, a kind of Caesar's Camp — a nest 

 on a green peak — on the Warwickshire side of Braunston 

 Brook. How the land came to be so parcelled, I do not 

 pretend to say — but as a fact the farms of Flecknoe parish are 

 portioned out as divisions of a circle whose centre is the village, 

 and whose sector lines, each from each, are great boundary- 

 fences in the strongest and most practical sense of the term. 

 Thus, though you may ride up to Flecknoe from the brook on 

 a very moderate hunter — you want nearly the best in the Hunt 

 to carve your way across the concentric farms. 



I look up from my paper at this moment on to the great 

 double that last spring scattered us all in the well-remem- 

 bered gallop from Braunston Gorse — all except (as I did not 

 grasp until a week after) Major Cosmo Little, who flew it in 

 one, and Mr. Pender who followed in two. Ah, I wish the 

 whole scene had been repeated this afternoon ! I warrant me 

 I had been carried over that country more blithely by my old 

 binoculars than ever I crossed it on quadruped. But Fates 

 were very contrary. While the squadrons on Braunston Hill 

 were being buffeted in the gale — now driven off in solid order 

 by the scourging rainstorms, now edging back to the gorse as a 

 brief lull in the hurricane allowed them to face about, and 

 detaching every now and then a deserter to gallop away 

 through the mist like a flying aide-de-camp through the smoke 



