nds are taking
in their search.

A gallant show it is by the wood! Horsemen and horsewomen, late comers
hastening up, restless horses, a throng for ever in motion, and every now
and then the blast of a horn rising up from the trees beneath. A gallant
show indeed, but two old cunning ones and their followers have slipped
away down to this obscure corner where they can see nothing of it, and are
themselves hidden. They know that the wood is triangular in shape, and
that from this, the apex, they have merely to pass the low hedge in front,
and, turning to the left, ride along the lower side, and so bisect the
course the fox will probably take. They know that the 'drive,' which
offers so straight and easy a descent through the wood from the park, is
pleasant enough till the lower ground is reached. There the soft, oozy
earth, which can never dry under the trees, is poached into a slough
through which even timber carriages cannot be drawn. Nor can a horseman
slip aside, because of the ash poles and thorn thickets. Those who are
trapped there must return to the park and gallop all round the wood
outside, unless they like to venture a roll in that liquid mud. Any one
can go to a meet, but to know all the peculiarities of the covers is only
given to those who have ridden over the country these forty years. In this
corner a detached copse of spruce fir keeps off the wind--the direction of
which they have noted--and in this shelter it is almost warm.

The distant crack of a whip, the solitary cry of a hound, a hollow shout,
and similar sounds, come frequently, and now and then there is an
irrepressible stir in the little group as they hear one of the many false
alarms that always occur in drawing a great wood. To these noises they are
keenly sensitive, but utterly ignore the signs of other life around them.
A pheasant, alarmed by the hounds, comes running quietly, thinking to
escape into the line of isolated copses that commences here; but, suddenly
confronted by the horsemen just outside, rises with an uproar, and goes
sailing down over the fields. Two squirrels, happy in the mild weather,
frisk out of the copse into the dank grass, till a curvet of one of the
horses frightens them up into the firs again.

Horses and men are becoming impatient. 'That dalled keeper has left an
earth open,' remarks one of the riders. His companion points with his whip
at the hedge just where it joins the wood. A long slender muzzle is thrust
for