A NORTH WARWICKSHIRE SPIN 189 



It was a day of universal scent. On many days — 

 most days — scent would appear to follow some rule of 

 local option — revelry here, total abstinence there. You 

 know little about scent. I know a good deal less than 

 nothing. But I am ready to believe, if any one will 

 advance a tangible theory, that certain soils are suited 

 on certain days, when the same apparent condtions of 

 atmosphere are of no use whatever in the next parish. 

 I believe, moreover, that foxes smell as variously as men 

 ride differently ; and, finally, I put my trust only in a 

 rising glass, and in a quick, cheery huntsman. Some 

 days hounds carry a scent up to their hackles, and then, 

 once bewildered, can find it nowhere ; other days they 

 can't get down to it for minutes, and then never lose it. 

 Air-scent and pad-scent, I suppose ? Hence to evapora- 

 tion, whose theory we can never formulate, but that is 

 answerable for the whole evolution of scent. Let it alone. 

 Yeve 'ya-atc ! Learn all we can, we shall never be able 

 to better a day dealt out to us. If a huntsman would 

 make a run, he must plod on, believing it lies in him to 

 make it, as a good man often will, when you and I, on- 

 lookers at high pressure, have left him alone to do it. 



CHAPTER XXVII 



A NORTH WARWICKSHIRE SPIN 



On Sunday, frozen to London, I was prompted not un- 

 naturally to join the ranks of the unemployed. To put 

 it correctly, I found myself passing through Trafalgar 

 Square, at the very moment that the noisiest and hoarsest 

 of the paid demagogues was blazing forth from betwixt 

 the lions, about the infamy of property and the rights of 

 those out of work. His fierce, if ill-delivered, philippic 

 exactly fell in with my ideas. " In every parish," he 

 said, while the well-fed bobbies smiled, and a well-amused 

 crowd laughed and applauded, " the unemployed should 

 help themselves, and show they were no longer to be 

 trampled upon." Very good. I would no longer be 



