526 FOX-HOUND, FOREST, AND PRAIRIE. 



Oaly within the past few days has it made its existence in any 

 degree actively evident. It was not until then that men had 

 given thought to jumping a fence or riding a gallop ; but, if 

 they visited the covertside at all, it was for little else but to 

 lounge, while, by hook or by crook, some cub-flesh was served 

 forth to the young entry. For themselves if from day to day 

 they practised with fair impunity over the open ditches 

 obligingly laid out for them in every thoroughfare of London 

 W. by the Electric Light Companies they felt they had 

 availed themselves of all the opportunity offered. (Some of the 

 younger members of the fraternity, indeed, had gone a step 

 further, and seized upon the indulgence as a nightly means of 

 qualifying for Melton's annual moonlight steeplechase.) 



A capital scent marked the final week of October, and put 

 life into it as you would have allowed had you, like me, from 

 the comfortable security of a gateway, to-day watched twenty 

 men and women abreast skim a drop fence into a furrow. 

 Honour bright, it was like nothing less than the patter of the 

 drums at tattoo or hailstones dropping on the roof of an 

 Aldershot hut. 



On Monday the Grafton had a " small-and-early " at Stowe 

 Wood, and so succeeded in catching the rime in full bloom. It 

 was indeed a wintry morning, such as should have no place 

 before our horses have begun to screw up, before even our 

 jackets are shed or our hair calls for cutting. Two or three 

 mornings such as these, and a frozen-out foxhunter will become 

 a thing of October a lusus naturce as startling as a white 

 bear in Piccadilly. Somewhere about ten o'clock (they had 

 begun an hour earlier than that) hounds were to be seen 

 glancing under the morning sun, as they feathered from field to 

 field 'twixt Stowe and Weedon. It seemed but a stone-throw 

 to reach them on the part of a cloud of late-comers kept abed 

 by the untimely cold. So these latter skirmished into the 

 valley and sought to rejoin hounds on the Weedon heights. 

 But the gates didn't fit, or weren't open, and so the fun began. 

 The impetus of the occasion was wholly insufficient : the state 



