THE BODDINGTON GALLOP. 409 



The Old Customer had little law given him ; but he never 

 looked for law any more than he expected quarter when his 

 time should come — as come it was about to do. He had 

 stretched his limbs ; he had shaken his fur ; his ear was 

 cocked. His brush too was carried aloft, and he knew his 

 ground too well to dream of trailing it in mud or loading it 

 with clay during the struggle for life. For all that, he scuffled 

 off in ungainly fashion when the whip met him face to face 

 at the plantation end. The fallow field doubtless spoiled his 

 action : and he was a bulldog rather than a greyhound fox — 

 short in the neck and thick in the back. I can see him now, 

 and I'll see him in my better dreams for many a month to 

 come. He was furred like a Pomeranian, and his robe was a 

 dark blood red. 



Hounds came out in a mass, and in a mass they ran till the 

 deed was done. Now to turn to ourselves. We were strung 

 out at this moment four abreast, for four hundred yards and 

 more along the plantation side. When the break -away crossed 

 the van, we closed up and crowded up, a cloud of horsemen 

 hovering on the hog's back, while the pack went as it were 

 from under our feet. The)'' were gone in the sunlight before we 

 felt they had started. Leisurely and foolishly we clustered to 

 the fringe fence that borders the green declivity leftward. A 

 little hedge and a parapet beyond on which to land ; so we 

 frittered timidly over. Dear lady, dear lady, whoever you were, 

 and if you will forgive me — 'twas a little cruel, it couldn't have 

 been cunning, of you to shriek " Wire," when you and a dozen 

 more were safely poised be3^ond, and the wire after all was only 

 on the ground ! Your silvery alarm bell didn't stop, it only 

 frightened us ; and, with back upon saddle-croups, we slid and 

 scrambled down this Devil's Dyke, to the road that leads 

 from the Gorse to Prior's Hardwick. Thence we filed out by 

 gap or gate, and knew we were on the great Wormleighton 

 pasture, where gates are many and where fences at double 

 distance are doubly grown. In this great open country three 

 fields go to a mile, and the ridge-and-furrow rolls as deeply as 



