STORM AND TEMPEST 219 



moment to crown his otherwise unimpeachable get-up 

 with a humble black billycock. The tout ensemble was 

 unusual, but on this occasion not absolutely singular. On 

 the contrary, were there not even soldiers of some dis- 

 tinction — from general officers to second lieutenants of 

 gunners — similarly accoutred, while wise men of all grades 

 had committed themselves to the keeping of rough-weather 

 suits of ungainly fashion ? But the storm-demon that 

 buffeted and bullied all alike, young and old, fair and un- 

 comely, was for the day in supreme command, and seized 

 greedily upon this incongruous subject as a lit and profitable 

 plaything. It tore the headpiece from our fashionable 

 friend, and sent it rolling among hounds at the moment 

 when the huntsman was galloping them to the line of a fox 

 just gone. The first few couple started aside as the black 

 object bounded into their midst, the body of the pack 

 leaned for an instant towards the bounding and apparently 

 inanimate intruder. But a few of the ''young and the 

 jealous " went for it open-mouthed, pursued it over half an 

 acre, and finally Baronet, recognising sympathy of colour, 

 ran clean into the uncanny thing in the open, his sole 

 excuse when rounded up by the first whip being couched 

 in the fact that he, Baronet, having been walked by the 

 butcher of Daventry and run by his hatless boys, had 

 never made acquaintance with a billycock, still less with 

 one endued with powers of leaping and going. 



This morning there had been also a special from 

 Oxford. I wot that in the results of the day these younger 

 Nimrods found " full value " — to use a comparatively 

 recent and, to my mind, admirably expressive phrase of 

 the carpe diem school, a school in w^hich, by the same 

 token, most of us have long been enrolled. 



But of the sport — how came it about ? Firstly, then, 

 with a fox from the gorse above mentioned, over the green 

 hilltop on which stands a certain windmill (or its lifeless 

 trunk, for our cheap loaf is of steam-ground wheat nowa- 

 days, and windmills have, like the sandwich-men of the 

 London streets, only casual employment as objects to 

 direct the eye). Their fox ran close past the mournful 

 edifice, onlv a field or so before hounds. But, after the 



