THE EARLIEST CUT 167 



" Oh, what a fool I was not to be hunting in November ! 

 And what have I to show for these (epithet) corn-bills ? " 

 " Counting up costs beforehand " is by no means what I 

 would urge. That is a form of practical philosophy that 

 I am puzzled to think where to place, certainly not among 

 hunting men, men of the world, even commercial men, 

 and more certainly still, not among women, as I have been 

 told to believe of them. It has at all events no place, 

 here and about in November, except as a caution against 

 short-sightedness — against such a principle, for instance, 

 as keeping your new coat in a drawer until you have paid 

 for it. 1 was nearly writing, " Why, you may be dead 

 before another year." But, simultaneously with the up- 

 starting of an expression that was not meant to be flippant, 

 comes the thought of an old merry comrade who lived his 

 life and was snatched away at its best maturity. We miss 

 him and we mourn him ; but who shall wish he had been 

 fated another death ? Not I, who miss him very vividly, 

 and who have none but distinctly happy memories of our 

 life's intercourse. Nor, I truly believe, would he have 

 desired it differently.^ 



Well, we hunt on and we ride on, in what we make 

 our world for the better part of the year. After that we 

 become atoms of a larger, less closely knit sphere. But 

 in lesser or larger universe the gaps in our front ranks are 

 readily filled, the rear rank steps up, recruits fall in, and 

 the world rotates none the less blithely. Only the elder 

 men sorrow for their contemporaries. Youth finds pro- 

 motion, and youth only thinks it contemptible to be older 

 than himself. 



After all, though the ball was set merrily rolling on 

 Wednesday, Misterton was no gala meet. No war-paint 

 was on show, except in the case of two braves from remote 

 edges of the reservation, and in the case of two or three 

 strangers, visitors from afar. These visitors, in fact, might 

 well have concluded that, after all, the Pytchley is but a 

 provincial little hunt — not as yet exactly descended to a 

 trencher-fed pack, but aspiring not to advertisement even 

 in the local papers. The level beauty of the Pytchley little 



^ Captain P.ay Middleton. 



