CHAPTER V. 



A COVERT SIDE. 



Had every thing been prepared to order, with a 

 view of gratifying to the utmost the wishes of the 

 keen assembled fox-hunters, it could not have been 

 improved on the Monday morning succeeding Fair- 

 fax's arrival at Melton Mowbray. 



There had been rain enough during the past days 

 to render the country more suitable for holding scent, 

 and yet not enough to make it inconveniently heavy 

 for horses of sufficient stamina. It was precisely such 

 a dawn as is prescribed in the famous old hunting song, 

 for "a southerly wind and a cloudy sky " did, indeed, 

 "proclaim it a hunting morning;" nor was there a 

 single dew-drop gemming the thorn-bushes, or any of 

 that low-creeping mist on the low grounds, or rising 

 net-work on the grass, which augur badly for the lying 

 of the scent, inasmuch as while the process of exhala- 

 tion is going on, it would appear that the delicate par- 

 ticles which hold the effluvium of the beast of chase in 

 suspense, are exhaled likewise together with the watery 

 globules among which it was deposited. 



At an early hour — early for them, be it understood, 

 for it is not now the mode of Melton to get up as our 

 forefathers did, hours before the sun, and painfully 

 hunt up the cold trail of the fox to his lair — when 

 Matuschevitz and his friend were aroused by the valet 

 with shaving water and the needfuls of the toilet, the 

 word went that the sun had shone brightly an hour or 

 two before — that is to say an hour or two after his 

 late December rising — but that the sky was now all 

 (IS) 



