BLACK MORE 



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no exception, and that on a day when a fitter occupation might have been 

 gathering primroses or searching for violets. For come the dog days you'll 

 have it no hotter or steamier, and the straw hat worn by one young lady 

 would have been quite de rigueuy had not the forecast showery, perhaps 

 thunder, followed so closely on the warning flashes of summer lightning 

 that only the eve before had brilliantly illuminated a moonlit sky. 



Hoarse till lunchtime, after halloaing that fox over one of the main 

 rides, my dear Major ! and down on my luck when hounds could not speak 

 to his trail. By-the-bye, and while it occurs to us, we missed you in the 

 subsequent run into Brentwood. Were you there, or was the garden too 

 full for you ? 



What were the feelings of the majority shortly afterwards when we 

 found hounds had slipped us, and gone goodness knows where, wouldn't. 



Near Blackmore High Woods 



we fear, look well on paper. But there was always consolation to be 

 gathered, and honey to be sipped in the bare thought of how frightfully 

 hot they must have found it who had gone pounding after hounds. A bare 

 half-dozen were with them in that brief journey across the open to Mill 

 Green — a lady''' on a beautiful thoroughbred black, Mr. C. E. Ridley (you 

 can't leave Mr. Ridley in Blackmore), Major Wilson and Capt. Tufnell 

 (he must pardon me if I am wrong, but he looks too young for a major). 

 Another lady in a light covert coat, which ere long changed its hue from a 

 muddy fall, went to the point, where, headed and baulked, the fox beat a 

 retreat back to the Woodlands. That, or another, which was it that 

 hounds ran hotly and fiercely for twenty minutes in the woods, and lost as 

 suddenly ? 



Mrs. Waters. 



