290 Silk and Scarlet, 



Farewell to Three weeks later those kennels had 

 Tubney. become a vast chase mart, for the exchange 

 of minds between twenty masters and five-and-thirty 

 huntsmen ; and many a mysterious little knot of three 

 in the park told that a new whip was being engaged. 

 A great fox-hunting era was just about to die out, but 

 there were symptoms of vitality enough about the 

 patriarch Jim Morgan ; and although he was rising 

 seventy-four, they might well ask Clark, why he 

 " admitted boys into the kenneir We care not to dwell 

 upon the woodpecker tap of Mr. Tattersall's hammer, 

 beneath the elm, near the kennels, and the 29J guinea 

 average for the entered, and the 36 guinea for the un- 

 entered, which it sealed. We must get forward three 

 months. 



The new O. B. H. pack had migrated to Oakley, 

 and everything looked very hopeless and drear when 

 we strolled in for the last time to have a look at the 

 old place. The stables from which Memnon, Eng- 

 land's Glory, Marlborough, Sir Warwick, Wild Rose, 

 Fisherman, Harkaway, Chesterfield, Bletchington, and 

 Topthorn had been sent on to cover so often, were 

 empty ; and a couple of magnoHas near the front 

 door, from which such troops of fox-hunting friends 

 had departed in an evening, and constituted them- 

 selves special commissioners to inquire whether the 

 Oxford hacks were as good as when they kept terms, 

 only made the desolation more complete. Even the 

 staunch old chaplain, who not only knew by sight, 

 but had traced and then written out in text-hand, the 

 name and pedigree of every hound of that kennel, to 

 the tenth generation, had fled the spot in despair. 

 The very straw-thatched houses, in which so many 

 scions of Sunderland, Hercules, Hector, and Foreman 

 were nursed, had been taken from that necropolis of 

 an orchard. The Tubney Ghost, which appeared to 

 John Jones, and is popularly supposed, even in its 

 calmer moments, to carry a carving knife, must have 



