and shouts arose, "Dyah she go!" "Dyah she
go!" "Dyah she go!"

Sure enough, there, just turning the hill, went a "molly cotton,"
bouncing. In a second we were all in full chase and cry, shouting to
each other, "whooping" on the dogs, and running with all our might. We
were so carried away by the excitement that not one of us even thought
of the fact that she would come stealing back.

No negro can resist the inclination to shout "Dyah she go!" and to run
after a hare when one gets up; it is involuntary and irresistible. Even
Uncle Limpy-Jack came bobbing along for a while, shouting, "Dyah she
go!" at the top of his voice; but being soon distanced he called his
dog, Rock, and went back to beat the ditch bank again.

The enthusiasm of the chase carried us all into the piece of pine beyond
the fence, where the pines were much too thick to see anything and where
only an occasional glimpse of a dog running backward and forward, or an
instinctive "oun-oun!" from the hounds, rewarded us. But "molly is berry
sly," and while the dogs were chasing each other around the pines,
she was tripping back down through the field to the place where we had
started her.

We were recalled by hearing an unexpected "bang" from the field behind
us, and dashing out of the woods we found Uncle Limpy-Jack holding up a
hare, and with a face whose gravity might have done for that of Fate.
He was instantly surrounded by the entire throng, whom he regarded with
superb disdain and spoke of as "you chillern."

"G' on, you chillern, whar you is gwine, and meek you' noise somewhar
else, an' keep out o' my way. I want to git some hyahs!"

He betrayed his pleasure only once, when, as he measured out the shot
from an old rag into his seamed palm, he said with a nod of his head:
"Y' all kin _run_ ole hyahs; de ole man' _shoots_ 'em." And as we
started off we heard him muttering:

"Ole Molly Hyah,
What yo' doin' dyah?
Settin' in de cornder
Smokin' a cigah."

We went back to the branch and began again to beat the bushes, Uncle
Limpy-Jack taking unquestioned the foremost place, which had heretofore
been held by us.

Suddenly there was a movement, a sort of scamper, a rash, as something
slipped out of the heavy grass at our feet and vanished in the thick
briers of the ditch bank. "Dy ah she go!" arose from a dozen throats,
and gone she was, in fact, safe in a thicket of briers which no dog nor
negro could penetrate.

The bushes