162 THE HORSE AND HIS EIDER. 



But while undertakers in scarlet, in black, and in brown 

 coats, were expending many thousand pounds in pre- 

 parations for his funeral, he, totally unconscious of them, 

 was creeping within it, in the rude health and perfect 

 happiness he had enjoyed in Leicestershire, his native 

 county. 



All of a sudden he hears disagreeable sounds, and 

 encounters unpleasant smells, that sentence him without 

 delay " to return to the place from whence he came." 

 With elastic limbs, and a stout heart to propel them, 

 "away" he starts. Everything he does evinces extraor- 

 dinary resolution, determination, and courage. While the 

 high-bred hounds that are following him over-top every 

 hedge, he dashes through their boughs, thorns, and briars, 

 as straight as an arrow from a bow. When, on reaching 

 the "earth" he has been making for, he finds that it is 

 stopped, instead of weakly dwelling there, '^ away'' he 

 again starts for some other cunning hidingplace. As he 

 proceeds, his wind, but not his courage, fails him, until, 

 on the pack approaching him, though any one of them 

 would have yelped piteously had but one of his toes 

 been caught in a trap, yet, so soon as the leading hound 

 comes up, he pitches into him, and when the infuriated 

 pack rush in upon him, he invariably dies in the midst 

 of them, without the utterance of the smallest moan, 

 sigh, or sound. In fact, within the breasts of all who have 



