le case, to 'turn the hearts of
the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the
parents, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come,'--as
come it surely will, if we persist much longer in substituting
denunciation for sympathy, instruction for education, and Pharisaism
for the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

1851.

CHAPTER I: THE PHILOSOPHY OF FOX-HUNTING

As this my story will probably run counter to more than one fashion
of the day, literary and other, it is prudent to bow to those
fashions wherever I honestly can; and therefore to begin with a
scrap of description.

The edge of a great fox-cover; a flat wilderness of low leafless
oaks fortified by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour
red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a
straight wood ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen
leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs;
some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young-
farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab
stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the
union, in Mackintosh and antigropelos; two holiday schoolboys with
trousers strapped down to bursting point, like a penny steamer's
safety-valve; a midshipman, the only merry one in the field, bumping
about on a fretting, sweating hack, with its nose a foot above its
ears; and Lancelot Smith, who then kept two good horses, and 'rode
forward' as a fine young fellow of three-and-twenty who can afford
it, and 'has nothing else to do,' has a very good right to ride.

But what is a description, without a sketch of the weather?--In
these Pantheist days especially, when a hero or heroine's moral
state must entirely depend on the barometer, and authors talk as if
Christians were cabbages, and a man's soul as well as his lungs
might be saved by sea-breezes and sunshine; or his character
developed by wearing guano in his shoes, and training himself
against a south wall--we must have a weather description, though, as
I shall presently show, one in flat contradiction of the popular
theory. Luckily for our information, Lancelot was very much given
to watch both the weather and himself, and had indeed, while in his
teens, combined the two in a sort of a soul-almanack on the
principles just mentioned--somewhat in this style:--

'Monday, 21st.--Wind S.W., bright sun, mer