clear of his horse. But as it was they came down together, and
unfortunately the horse was uppermost. Just as it happened Lord
Hampstead made his way through the gate, and was the first who
dismounted to give assistance to his friend. In two or three minutes
there was a crowd round, with a doctor in the midst of it, and a
rumour was going about that the man had been killed. In the mean time
the enemies were riding well to the hounds, with Tolleyboy but a few
yards behind them, Tolleyboy having judiciously remembered a spot
at which he could make his way out of the covert into field without
either passing through the gate or over the fence.

The reader may as well know at once that Walker was not killed. He
was not killed, though he was so crushed and mauled with broken ribs
and collar-bone, so knocked out of breath and stunned and mangled and
squeezed, so pummelled and pounded and generally misused, that he did
not come to himself for many hours, and could never after remember
anything of that day's performances after eating his breakfast at
Gorse Hall. It was a week before tidings went through the Shires that
he was likely to live at all, and even then it was asserted that he
had been so altogether smashed that he would never again use any of
his limbs. On the morning after the hunt his widowed mother and only
sister were down with him at the hotel, and there they remained till
they were able to carry him away to his own house. "Won't I?" was
almost the first intelligible word he said when his mother suggested
to him, her only son, that now at least he would promise to abandon
that desperate amusement, and would never go hunting any more. It may
be said in praise of British surgery generally that Walker was out
again on the first of the following November.

But Walker with his misfortunes and his heroism and his recovery
would have been nothing to us had it been known from the first to
all the field that Walker had been the victim. The accident happened
between eleven and twelve,--probably not much before twelve. But
the tidings of it were sent up by telegraph from some neighbouring
station to London in time to be inserted in one of the afternoon
newspapers of that day; and the tidings as sent informed the public
that Lord Hampstead while hunting that morning had fallen with his
horse at the corner of Gimberly Green, that the animal had fallen
on him,--and that he had been crushed to death. Had the false
information