A GALLOP. 513 



some hour of 11 ; and the morning alternated rapidly twixt 

 sunshine and shower. It will be, as it were, but repeating an 

 axiom to mention that I came up late. (May my worst enemy 

 suffer in perpetuo what I have in minutes and moments when 

 seeking hounds !) I can't help it. Trains never fit ; horses 

 don't come round to the door ; and procrastination is inborn. 

 Yet a kind providence seldom permits me to be altogether too 

 late. This morning the road from Brockenhurst was thickly 

 dotted with the autumnal visitors who with good judgment 

 make the New Forest their resting place. There were many 

 young couples. To these I ventured to address no such earth- 

 born inquiry as related to the mere whereabouts of hounds. 

 There were two or three artists with greenery canvas in hand. 

 They did not look promising — " female of sex," and plain at 

 that. Nurserymaids in abundance, and children in triplets. 

 At last a bicyclist — desisting for a while from the merry 

 pastime of whisking past horses' noses, and now harmlessly 

 smoking his pipe, while his war cycle lay prone by the roadside. 

 From him I gleaned that hounds had moved " straight up the 

 Lyndhurst road twenty minutes ago " — and thither I hurried, 

 oblivious of the fresh forest scenery, careless of tint of leaf or 

 colour of flower, wondering vaguely how all these people could 

 be aimlessly straying through the glades, when hounds were in 

 their very neighbourhood. (The melancholy Jacques, in truth, 

 was a merry jester as compared with a late-comer in his 

 moments of misery.) Now over a gentle rise I came upon 

 horsemen moving — some in one direction, some in another. I 

 gathered, by frantic, hurried, questioning that the deer had 

 been found and that the pack had been laid on ! Where no 

 one seemed exactly to know ; but they galloped all the same. 

 I and others, galloping all, went a complete circle at racing 

 pace, round and within the Inclosure of Pondhead — to find at 

 length in wondering gratitude that all the while we had been 

 galloping round Master, huntsman, and hounds. It came out 

 afterwards that the old buck had been harboured, and without 

 delay roused in Pondhead, and that ten minutes later the pack 



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