leader of fashion, but not yet the leader of the Hunt;
the Major, an old shekarry from India, who still could ride as straight
and fast as any man in the west; and his niece, the belle of the
countryside, whose mettlesome hunter occasionally showed a sudden
fondness for taking the bit between his teeth, and carrying his
mistress, with reckless abandon, over furrow and five-barred gate and
through the thickest hedgerow--anywhere, so long as he had breath and
the music of the hounds allured him onward in his impetuous career. The
sun glanced between the trees as they passed the cottage door. Then came
the Magistrate's Clerk, faultlessly attired, with florid face and
glittering eyeglass, who, in an ambitious youth, finding his name too
suggestive of plebeian blood, changed a vowel in it, and thereby gave an
aristocratic flavour to the title of his partnership, and who acquired,
with this new dignity, the taste for a monocle, a horse, and a good
cigar. Following were the members of the medley--the big butcher on his
sturdy pony, the "dealer" on his black, raw-boned half-bred, the
publican on his stolid old mare, farmers, drovers, after-riders, on
cropped and uncropped mounts more accustomed to the slow drudgery of
labour than to the rollicking, hard-going hunt; and after them the crowd
on foot--village children, farm labourers, and apprentices from forge
and counter. Riding side by side, and earnestly conversing, were the
"vet," whose horse at the last hunt bolted and left him clinging to a
bough, and the shopkeeper, whose grave attire and sober mien seemed
strangely out of keeping with the bright, hilarious throng. These were
soon met by the main party from the meet, and hounds and hunters sped
away in the direction of the hillside covert, while the onlookers
adjourned to the uplands, whence an almost uninterrupted view of the
valleys for miles around might be enjoyed, and the movements of the fox
and his enemies followed more closely than from the hollows beneath the
woods.

Reynard, abundantly satisfied with his supper of eggs and early
breakfast of rabbit, was lying asleep in a tuft of grass at the top of
the thicket when the huntsman passed down the dingle after the meet.
Awakened by the noise that reached him from below, he arose, stretched
his limbs, and listened anxiously--the clatter of hoofs seemed to fill
the valley. Suddenly, from the outskirts of the wood, came the deep,
sonorous note of a hound, followed by th