he stubbles, and
thundered fetlock-deep along the heavy meadows; and every fence
thinned the cavalcade, till the madness began to stir all bloods,
and with grim earnest silent faces, the initiated few settled
themselves to their work, and with the colonel and Lancelot at their
head, 'took their pleasure sadly, after the manner of their nation,'
as old Froissart has it.

'Thorough bush, through brier,
Thorough park, through pale;'

till the rolling grass-lands spread out into flat black open
fallows, crossed with grassy baulks, and here and there a long
melancholy line of tall elms, while before them the high chalk
ranges gleamed above the mist like a vast wall of emerald enamelled
with snow, and the winding river glittering at their feet.

'A polite fox!' observed the colonel. 'He's leading the squire
straight home to Whitford, just in time for dinner.'

* * * * *

They were in the last meadow, with the stream before them. A line
of struggling heads in the swollen and milky current showed the
hounds' opinion of Reynard's course. The sportsmen galloped off
towards the nearest bridge. Bracebridge looked back at Lancelot,
who had been keeping by his side in sulky rivalry, following him
successfully through all manner of desperate places, and more and
more angry with himself and the guiltless colonel, because he only
followed, while the colonel's quicker and unembarrassed wit, which
lived wholly in the present moment, saw long before Lancelot, 'how
to cut out his work,' in every field.

'I shan't go round,' quietly observed the colonel.

'Do you fancy I shall?' growled Lancelot, who took for granted--poor
thin-skinned soul! that the words were meant as a hit at himself.

'You're a brace of geese,' politely observed the old squire; 'and
you'll find it out in rheumatic fever. There--"one fool makes
many!" You'll kill Smith before you're done, colonel!' and the old
man wheeled away up the meadow, as Bracebridge shouted after him,--

'Oh, he'll make a fine rider--in time!'

'In time!' Lancelot could have knocked the unsuspecting colonel
down for the word. It just expressed the contrast, which had
fretted him ever since he began to hunt with the Whitford Priors
hounds. The colonel's long practice and consummate skill in all he
took in hand,--his experience of all society, from the prairie
Indian to Crockford's, from the prize-ring to the continental
courts,--his varied and