240 STB AY -AW AYS 



The wood and its surroundings have been " made 

 good," and proved bad; the Master pushes her way 

 out of it, through a screen of branches and briars, 

 over a stony fence, flops into bog, struggles out, 

 ascends to a commanding point of rock (in the eye 

 of the wind and the teeth of the sleet) and begins to 

 blow her hounds out of covert. She thinks yearn- 

 ingly of her letters, her armchair, her fire, of, in short — 

 " Home ! The woman's place " ! But, as she says 

 to herself, she promised the Cooladreen people to draw 

 round the lake there, and there was talk of poisoning 

 the foxes if they were neglected — and there was that 

 awful hill, Drumlicky, she supposes she is bound to 

 go on there, too, even though she knows only too well 

 that there isn't " a grain o' scent," nor the ghost of 

 a fox above ground. 



Poor Deputy Masters, who had, added to their 

 other trials, the certainty that not a few among the 

 non-subscribers to the Hunt had encouraged them- 

 selves in that particular war economy with the 

 assertion that " the hunting-field is not the Woman's 

 Place " ! 



I am far from trying to imply that the Deputy was 

 unhappy. Far otherwise ; I believe she would tell 

 you that her toil had its own compensations. I am 

 also inclined to think that for those absent lads, 

 whose bodies were in kliaki in far-away places, while 

 their hearts followed their well-beloved hounds through 

 the well-remembered home country, the place of those 

 women who abandoned " their proper place," and 

 went to the kennels (if not to the dogs) to keep the 

 hunts alive till the boys came home again, has not 

 been so very far behind that high place of those other 

 women whose more splendid part it was to seek 

 and find the woman's place wherever their country 

 needed their help, or suffering called for service. 



