he day, with seven yards of pumpkin vine streaming out behind, and
away we dashed 'cross country. I remained mounted not because I enjoyed
it, for I did not, but because I dreaded to dismount. I hated to get off
in pieces. If I can't get off a horse's back as a whole, I would rather
adhere to the horse. I will adhere that I did so.

We did not see the fox, but we saw almost everything else. I remember,
among other things, of riding through a hothouse, and how I enjoyed it.
A morning scamper through a conservatory when the syringas and Jonquils
and Jack roses lie cuddled up together in their little beds, is a thing
to remember and look back to and pay for. To stand knee-deep in glass
and gladiolas, to smell the mashed and mussed up mignonette and the last
fragrant sigh of the scrunched heliotrope beneath the hoof of your
horse, while far away the deep-mouthed baying of the hoarse hounds,
hotly hugging the reeking trail of the aniseseed bag, calls on the
gorgeously caparisoned hills to give back their merry music or fork it
over to other answering hills, is joy to the huntsman's heart.

On, on I rode with my unconfined locks streaming behind me in the autumn
wind. On and still on I sped, the big, bright pumpkin slipping up and
down the gambrel of my spirited horse at every jump. On and ever on we
went, shedding terror and pumpkin seeds along our glittering track till
my proud steed ran his leg in a gopher hole and fell over one of those
machines that they put on a high-headed steer to keep him from jumping
fences. As the horse fell, the necklace of this hickory poke flew up and
adjusted itself around my throat. In an instant my steed was on his feet
again, and gayly we went forward while the prong of this barbarous
appliance, ever and anon plowed into a brand new culvert or rooted up a
clover field. Every time it ran into an orchard or a cemetery it would
jar my neck and knock me silly. But I could see with joy that it reduced
the speed of my horse. At last as the sun went down, reluctantly, it
seemed to me, for he knew that he would never see such riding again, my
ill-spent horse fell with a hollow moan, curled up, gave a spasmodic
quiver with his little, nerveless, sawed-off tail and died.

The other huntsmen succeeded in treeing the anise-seed bag at sundown,
in time to catch the 6 o'clock train home.

Fox-hunting is one of the most thrilling pastimes of which I know, and
for young men whose parents have amassed larg