82 BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK. 



on a memorable occasion was not more straitly 

 penned behind its shutters than was Wales as we 

 rode through it. The wayside villages seemed 

 asleep, the farmhouse doors were shut, and the 

 silence of the roads was comparable only to that 

 supremest of earth's silences when one is thrown 

 out of a run, and hounds, riders, and runners have 

 seemingly passed away into eternity. 



Turning inland again among the low oak-woods, 

 the country was rich and flowery, and always 

 silent, and we ourselves were hot and speechless 

 under the hot, grey sky. A discovery that one of 

 the girths was rubbing off the skin behind Tom's 

 foreleg occasioned a delay fraught with gloom, 

 difficulty, and the tongues of buckles. Miss 

 O'Flannigan mounted a rock, and fell to sketching 

 the unsketchable — a habit with her in moments of 

 inglorious crisis, her sole contribution to the diffi- 

 culty being a stout square of chamois leather 

 which she wore on her chest in memory of a de- 

 parted cold. With this interesting relic I padded 

 the girth, and we proceeded in despondency. It 

 was one of the junctures when the Tommies, and 



