ting a brief, urgent letter to a distant friend. As the result, a few
days afterwards three little terriers, specially trained for "drawing" a
badger, arrived at the Master's house, and were accommodated in a vacant
"loose-box" in the stables. Late at night, one of these was introduced
to the "set," and from the experiment the Master was led to believe
that, though the place, as he surmised, was empty of its usual tenants
at the time, it held sure promise of sport for an "off" day, as soon as
the otter-hounds, now about to hunt in the rivers of the west, had
departed from the neighbourhood. Meanwhile, according to his strictest
orders, the little terriers were well fed, regularly exercised, and kept
from quarrelling, and their coats were carefully brushed and oiled that
they might be as fit as fiddles for the eventful "draw."

The Master was a rigid disciplinarian in all matters concerned with
sport. His servants, one and all, from the old, white-haired family
butler down to the little stable-boy, idolised him, but never presumed
to disobey his slightest command. For many years before he came to live
at the mansion, the Hunt had fallen into a state of extreme neglect; the
pack was one of the worst in the kingdom, the subscriptions were
irregular, the kennel servants were ill-paid, the poor cottagers never
received payment for losses when Reynard visited their hen-coops, and
even the farmers began to grumble at needless damage to their hedges,
and to refuse to "walk" the puppies. But the new Master had changed all
this. He bore his share, but no more, of the expense caused by the
reforms he at once introduced, and he reminded his proud yet stingy
neighbours that the pack existed for their sport as much as for his own,
that arrears were shown in his secretary's subscription-books, and that,
unless the funds were augmented, he would reconsider the step he had
taken in accepting the Mastership. Useless servants, useless hounds, and
merely ornamental members of the Hunt, alike disappeared; and with
system and discipline came season after season of prosperity,
contentment, and justice, till it seemed that the best old traditions of
British sport were revived in a community of hard-working, rough-riding
fox-hunters, among the isolated valleys of the west.

As might be inferred from the personality of the Squire, everything was
in apple-pie order on the glorious summer morning when he and his
huntsmen made their way down river