336 The Poacher. 



at command, and who deem it a bounden duty, as it were, to appear 

 at every covert side during the season) ever thought of sending a 

 horse on. There are some such men in every hunt, men who 

 appear to be as regularly attached to the hounds as the servants of 

 the establishment 5 and if by chance one of these well-known faces 

 is missed from any covert-side, the question immediately passes 

 from mouth to mouth, " I wonder where So-and-so is to-day ; I 

 hope there's nothing the matter at home." 



But this year no man liked, if he could help it, to miss a single 

 meet, for there were no blank days j every run seemed to be better 

 than the last j and whenever I met the hounds on the Saturday or 

 the Wednesday (the two days in the week which best suited the 

 "short-handed" men in our hunt), the first question invariably used 

 to be, " Did you hear what a rattling thing we had on the Monday 

 or Thursday ?" the day which I had missed. I only owned two 

 horses, and I could not manage more than two days a week com- 

 fortably : in fact, this was rather too much in a season like the one 

 I am describing ; but up to this, I had got on very well. We had 

 three " crackers" in November, all of which I had seen ; but the 

 meets had hitherto been rather wide of us, and the "run of the 

 season" had yet to come. However, at last the long- wished for 

 announcement "Saturday: Findon Toll-bar" appeared in the 

 county paper, and every man who read that paragraph knew that 

 his work was cut out for him on the Saturday. There was not- a 

 man in our hunt who would not sooner miss his dinner for a week 

 than a Findon Toll-bar meet j and a Findon-gorse fox generally 

 gave us something to talk about for months after. We had had a 

 goodish thing on the Wednesday, over perhaps as good, but quite 

 a different sort of country from the Findon. The hounds had never 

 yet this season met at Findon j but as this was always a Saturday's 

 meet, and I had been expecting that it would soon come, I had been 

 saving the grey (my best horse) as much as I could, and always 

 riding him on the Saturdays. 



I was at breakfast on Thursday when the paper arrived, and five 

 minutes after was in the stable to tell the glad news to the groom. 



