went
rearing round on their heels, depositing one hat and another rider in
the current. One gallant steed planted his feet like a tower, and
snorted down at the water. One flopped gravely in, and had to swim, and
be dragged out. Another leaped, and landed with his feet on the other
bank, his haunches in the water, and his rider curled round his neck,
and glaring out between his retroverted ears.

But Miss Peyton encouraged her horse with spur and voice, set her teeth,
turned rather pale this time, and went at the brook with a rush, and
cleared it like a deer. She and the huntsman were almost alone together
on the other side, and were as close to the dogs as the dogs were to
poor Pug, when he slipped through a run in a quickset hedge, and,
reducing the dogs to single file, glided into Dogmore Underwood, a stiff
hazel coppice of five years' growth.

The other riders soon straggled up, and then the thing was to get him
out again. There were a few narrow roads cut in the underwood; and up
and down these the huntsman and whipper-in went trotting, and encouraged
the stanch hounds, and whipped the skulkers back into covert. Others
galloped uselessly about, pounding the earth, for daisy-cutters were few
in those days; and Miss Peyton relapsed into the transcendental. She sat
in one place, with her elbow on her knee, and her fair chin supported by
two fingers, as undisturbed by the fracas of horns and voices as an
equestrian statue of Diana.

She sat so still and so long at a corner of the underwood that at last
the harassed fox stole out close to her with lolling tongue and eye
askant, and took the open field again. She thrilled at first sight of
him, and her cheeks burned; but her quick eye took in all the signs of
his distress, and she sat quiet, and watched him coolly. Not so her
horse. He plunged, and then trembled all over, and planted his fore-feet
together at this angle \, and parted his hind-legs a little, and so
stood quivering, with cocked ears, and peeped over a low paling at the
retiring quadruped, and fretted and sweated in anticipation of the
gallop his long head told him was to follow. He looked a deal more
statuesque than any three statues in England, and all about a creature
not up to his knee.--And by the bye: the gentlemen who carve horses in
our native isle, did they ever see one,--out of an omnibus?--The
whipper-in came by, and found him in this gallant attitude, and
suspected the truth, but, observing