THE CURATE IN SPRING. 197 



ground was surface-laden with wet ; bat the storms were 

 all past, the sky wore an even face, and the glass was 

 rising steadily. 



From the brow crowned by the road, the Vale opens 

 downwards in chequered ridges of steep green turf, till 

 the eye reaches the lower level, to rest on a flat un- 

 broken vista stretching away to the eastern horizon. On 

 the right flank, however, and some half dozen miles away, 

 rise the boundary hills of Holwell and Clawson, continued 

 iji those of Harby and the Belvoir Woods. Down these 

 first steep pitches hounds were now speeding like sea- 

 birds over a storm-tossed sea — their white forms now 

 dipping out of sight, now rising for som.e moments, to 

 disappear again. And what were most of us doing? 

 Why, taking our turn with too many others — first to 

 plunge through the only gap that could help us out of 

 the road, then to dribble, perforce, in single file in the 

 line of hounds. There was no escape. Each sturdy 

 fence presented only one loophole ; this had been 

 promptly seized by those in front, and tlie others had 

 nothing for it but to follow in leisurely distraction. To 

 make up ground through a field of horsemen is at any 

 time an uphill task ; when the country is so strong as 

 only to admit of progress in a single string it is an 

 absolute impossibility. By which — and what has gone 

 before — it will be rightly assumed that the man who has 

 to tell the tale was not quite where he wished to be. 

 And many better than he (for are we not all of us tailors 

 in turn ?) were in similar predicament — working as part 

 of a machine, riding as men in a dream, ever pushing on 



