ence before the river.

"Please God I'll never be a woman again!" ejaculated Mr. Denny as he
wedged his left leg more tightly in behind the torturing leaping horn,
"that was a hairy old place! I wish Mary saw the pair of us coming up on
to it like new-born stags!"

Had Mary seen him and "Matchbox" a moment later, emerging separately
from a hole in mid stream, her respect might not have prevented her
from laughing, but the fact remains that the pair got across somehow.
At the top of the hill beyond the river Dinny Johnny saw the hounds for
the first time. They had checked on the road by the bridge, but now he
heard them throwing their tongues as they hit the line again, the fatal
line that was leading them to the covert. Even at this moment, Mr. Denny
could not restrain an admiration that would appear to most people
ill-timed.

"Aren't they going the hell of a docket!" he exclaimed fondly, "and good
old Chantress leading the lot of them, the darling! It'll be a queer
thing now, if I don't get there in time!"

Blown though the pony was, he knew instinctively that he had not yet
come to the end of her, and he drove her along at a canter until he
reached a lane that encircled the covert, along which he would have to
go to intercept the hounds. As he jumped into it he was suddenly aware
of a yelling crowd of men and boys, who seemed, with nightmare
unexpectedness, to fill all the lane behind him. He knew what they were
there for, and oblivious of the lamentable absurdity of his appearance,
he turned and roared out a defiance as he clattered at full speed down
the stony lane. It seemed like another and almost expected episode in
the nightmare when he became aware of a barricade of stones, built
across the road to a height of about four feet, with along the top of
it--raising it to what, on a fourteen hand pony, looked like
impossibility--the branch of a fir-tree, with all its bristling twigs
left on it.

He heard the cry of the hounds clearly now; they were within a couple of
fields of the covert. Dinny Johnny drove his left spur into the little
mare's panting side, let go the crutch, took hold of her head in the way
that is unmistakable, and faced her at the barricade. As he did so a
countryman sprang up at his right hand and struck furiously at him with
a heavy potato spade. The blow was aimed at Dinny Johnny, but the moment
was miscalculated, and it fell on "Matchbox" instead. The sharp blade
gashed her hind quarter,