HORSE AND HOUND 289 



the ground, here and there drifted into heaps, are mixed 

 with the ruddy spilth from the beeches whose smooth 

 green-grey trunks are as sharply contrasted as their 

 leaves. How full of colour is the carpet ! How full of 

 form the pencilled outlines of bough and trunk ! and 

 presently the meditative walker reaches a ride, a corridor, 

 a cloister that crosses the wood from side to side. Very 

 faint and far come sounds that may be the music of the 

 pack and the call of the horn and the last halloo. These 

 might be 



The horns of Elfland faintly blowing. 



But they are of another world. The pock marks made 

 by galloping horses down the ride are already filled with 

 ooze. Already a rabbit or two is feeling his timid way 

 into the open. The jays shout gleefully, and from his 

 drey in an oak looks out a red squkrel. The place has 

 forgotten the hunt. It has disturbed nothing. The 

 pheasants have done no more than fly from one part of 

 the wood to the other. Perhaps the cause is a sense of 

 relief, but never does one seem to see so many animals 

 at their ease as in the wake of a hunt. Even the scattered 

 cubs will be back again within half an hour, alert and yet 

 careless, stepping daintily. Animals soon forget. It 

 is harrying that brings misery, as the hunters appear to 

 feel. The buzzard, as we have seen, hunts over wide 

 spaces and seldom near home. The stoat travels far, as 

 the huntsman scatters his meets. None of them nags. 

 So it comes about that those who lag behind the chase, 

 preferring, for all its vivacious glamour, like the monks 

 of the Grande Chartreuse, a sylvan solitude, discover that 

 the covert, just now combed out by the pack, and watched 

 on all sides by a hundred pairs of eyes, has become the 

 transformation scene of the Christmas pantomime. The 



X T.V.E. 



