200 The Hunting Field With Horse and Hound 



that has hitherto hidden them from our view, their voices 

 coming to us faintly now and then, keeping us between 

 hope and despair. We see they are racing away in a 

 circle that is bringing them our way. We rush along to inter- 

 cept them. They halt, turn sharply to the right, and are 

 coming straight for the highway where we stand. On and on 

 w^e go for the next thirty minutes, till the hounds throw their 

 heads in a farmyard; and a most welcome check it is. "Seven 

 miles from the last check and covered in thirty-three minutes," 

 says some one, consulting his watch. But while we are about 

 to dismount for a breathing spell, the hounds break away at a 

 rattling pace for another five minutes. It seems as if every 

 field must be the last, and that the hounds must be on the very 

 heels of their prey. Check again! It does not seem possible 

 that many more such spurts can be left in deer, hound, horse, 

 or man. The deer is evidently making for the sea, but until 

 this check it seemed as if she could never hold the pace to reach 

 there. 



While waiting in the highway, beyond a farmhouse, the 

 hounds pick up the trail again, and come across the road in 

 front of us "full cry." It seems impossible that the deer could 

 have taken that line, but so it must have been. Where the 

 hounds came through the bottom of the hedge, the bank is 

 fully eight feet high; on the top of this bank is a stiff hedge 

 twelve to fifteen feet high. That a deer could jump the hedge 

 from the field side, we have no doubt, but think of the drop on 

 the landing side, and of landing in the middle of a macadamised 

 road! One would think the slender legs of the deer could 

 never withstand such a shock; but they have withstood it, for 

 the hounds are running again, not to the sea, as we expected, 

 but to the right, following the coast, two or three fields back 

 from the beach. On she goes for another eight miles, almost 

 straight away over beautiful level grass lands. At last the 

 hounds are but a field behind their game, and the riders — 



