THE HAUGHTYSHIRE HUNT. 



saddle-room fire being much more in his line than threading 

 his way through country lanes dense with a suffocating fog 

 — to say that hounds would not hunt, and thus save waiting 

 to all and sundry of the very keen division, who, hoping 

 against hope, had turned up at the appointed tryst. 



Banging their hands against their sporting breasts, and on 

 their pipeclayed thighs, some five-and-twenty or thirty men 

 were jogging impatiently up and down, by a sign-post where 

 three roads met. To keep yourself warm in a dense, frosty fog 

 — although it was not actually freezing — is at all times a 

 hard matter. Wlien you have nothing to do but wait, it is 

 doubly so. 



"Well, Walter?" shout half-a-dozen voices at once, in 

 interrogative tones, as that worthy's scarlet coat emerges 

 suddenly out of the fog. Walter touches his cap to all, 

 officially^ — to those who tip him, almost afiectionately. 



"The Dook, genelmen, sends his compliments, and is sorry 

 'ounds can't come to-day ; 'is Grace sees no sign o' clearin' 

 and 'e's afraid 'arf the pack 'd be lost in this 'ere fog." 



"Ah, well, I told you so" — " Of course you couldn't hunt 

 with a fog like this " — " Could have come perfectly well if he'd 

 liked" — "No chance of hunting, as I said all along" — 

 " They'd have gone, right enough, if I'd had the pack," etc., 

 etc., etc., was the chorus that broke out immediately on receipt 

 of the news, and then ensued the usual " Going my way 

 home?" — "I must follow the lane to-day — should lose myself 

 if I struck across the fields" — "Good-morning, sir, good- 

 morning — well, better luck on Saturday," and sundry other 

 valedictory words, as the company gradually broke up and 

 jogged off in difi'erent directions, in twos and threes and fours, 



