570 FOX -HOUND, FOREST, AND PRAIRIE. 



side. It opens out the severest possibilities— a chill-on-the- 

 liver (the complaint of fashion and the keynote of most adult 

 maladies), the surrendering of hunting, the handing-in your 

 very life's papers, the snuffing out of your more or less worth- 

 less candle ! My own sensations, under this comfortless con- 

 dition of being, include few reflections on such abstract con- 

 tingencies. But in the misery of the moment I feel like 

 nothing so exactly as a trussed and unclad chicken on Mr. 

 Gilson's marble shop front — my liver tucked under one arm, 

 my gizzard under the other. The slender and more or less 

 inefficient garment in which many of us habit ourselves, under 

 the idea that it is smart and very orthodox, may not unlikely 

 be answei'able for such congealed vein of thought. A swallow- 

 tail is like the swallow itself. It takes more than one to 

 make a summer. And the sufferer under the single presence 

 cannot but feel woebegone and chickenhearted. 



So I go home, and arm myself with a flannel shirt and a 

 thickest possible riding-belt (" stays," my valet cVecurie will 

 insist on terming it, as he hands up the mysterious garment) 

 ere I sally forth on Monday, to meet a burning sun and a well- 

 thawed field. The same people— or about half the same and 

 the rest similar— are very different indeed to the shrivelled, 

 unhappy mortals of Saturday. Laugh and quip and merry 

 greeting take the place of moan and sulk and half suppressed 

 grumble. Pleasure lit up faces that on Saturday were pinched 

 with pain ; and the whole world seemed different. In the 

 morning the Grafton hunted their fox down — an immense 

 great fellow — from Fawsley fishponds and round about to 

 Charvvelton. 



As I sauntered homeward in the warm sunshine — wrapping 

 myself in a pleasant cloud of meditation and tobacco — -there 

 fluttered from the tall hedge of the laneside a bird that 

 belongs to the summer quite as much as does a swallow — 

 cuckoo, to wit. Many of my fox-hunting friends might tell 

 me they had seen a cuckoo on the 23rd February, and, while 

 accepting their statement in all courtesy, I should salt it with 



