l like her."

"I hope you will. You know Mr. Finn. He is here. He and my husband
are very old friends. And Adelaide Maule is your cousin. She hunts
too. And so does Mr. Maule,--only not quite so energetically. I think
that is all we shall have."

Immediately after that all the guests came in at once, and a
discussion was heard as they were passing through the hall.
"No;--that wasn't it," said Mrs. Spooner loudly. "I don't care what
Dick said." Dick Rabbit was the first whip, and seemed to have been
much exercised with the matter now under dispute. "The fox never went
into Grobby Gorse at all. I was there and saw Sappho give him a line
down the bank."

"I think he must have gone into the gorse, my dear," said her
husband. "The earth was open, you know."

"I tell you she didn't. You weren't there, and you can't know. I'm
sure it was a vixen by her running. We ought to have killed that
fox, my Lord." Then Mrs. Spooner made her obeisance to her hostess.
Perhaps she was rather slow in doing this, but the greatness of the
subject had been the cause. These are matters so important, that the
ordinary civilities of the world should not stand in their way.

"What do you say, Chiltern?" asked the husband.

"I say that Mrs. Spooner isn't very often wrong, and that Dick Rabbit
isn't very often right about a fox."

"It was a pretty run," said Phineas.

"Just thirty-four minutes," said Mr. Spooner.

"Thirty-two up to Grobby Gorse," asserted Mrs. Spooner. "The hounds
never hunted a yard after that. Dick hurried them into the gorse, and
the old hound wouldn't stick to his line when she found that no one
believed her."

This was on a Monday evening, and the Brake hounds went out generally
five days a week. "You'll hunt to-morrow, I suppose?" Lady Chiltern
said to Silverbridge.

"I hope so."

"You must hunt to-morrow. Indeed there is nothing else to do.
Chiltern has taken such a dislike to shooting-men, that he won't
shoot pheasants himself. We don't hunt on Wednesdays or Sundays, and
then everybody lies in bed. Here is Mr. Maule, he lies in bed on
other mornings as well, and spends the rest of his day riding about
the country looking for the hounds."

"Does he ever find them?"

"What did become of you all to-day?" said Mr. Maule, as he took his
place at the dinner-table. "You can't have drawn any of the coverts
regularly."

"Then we found our foxes without drawing them," said the Master.

"We chopped one at Bromley