dow of the great
house up to the western door. Here all is life and bustle. Twenty or
thirty carriages are drawn up by the widespreading lawn: grooms are
holding horses ready for their masters, who are refreshing the inner man
with cherry brandy and cold breakfast indoors. A tinkle of bells is
heard as the duchess of Wellington drives herself up with her three
ponies abreast, Russian fashion. Then a perfectly-appointed brougham,
with a pair of magnificent cobs, stops in a corner, and a soldier-like
foreigner in a red coat helps out a quiet-looking English lady wrapped
up in furs. She slips them off as her groom leads up a priceless horse
for her to mount, and in a moment is in the saddle, and will ride as
straight as any man in the field to-day. Her husband, Count Morella,
better known as the famous Carlist general Cabrera, whose strange and
terrible history many years ago fascinated the gentle English heiress,
now satisfies his war-like spirit by fox-hunting on the best horses that
money can buy, and has settled down into a quiet English country
gentleman.

The hounds have arrived before us. There they are--the beauties!--on the
green grass, and we ride in among them to have a word with Tom Swetman
the huntsman and good George Austin the whip, the latter of whom has
given me a lead over many a fence. Gallant Tom! the bravest and gentlest
of men, how little we thought that in a year or two we should never see
your honest face again on earth! But you will be long remembered, though
you are with us no more, and the story will be told for years to come of
a day when the hounds ran into their fox on the South-western Railway.
It was in a cutting fifty feet deep, with a tremendous fence at the top.
Tom arrived just in time to see his hounds on the rails, with poor
Reynard dead in their midst and the express train from Southampton
speeding up the hill at fifty miles an hour. He crammed his horse over
the great post and rails, down the almost perpendicular side of the
cutting, whipped the hounds off, and, as the train rushed screaming by,
rode out from under the very wheels of the engine and up the farther
bank with his rescued pack.

But now our master, Mr. Garth, comes down the steps--a signal that we
must no longer waste time talking with our neighbors, and like a good
old friend he gives us a private programme of the way we shall draw.
Stirrups are lengthened or shortened, girths tightened, restive horses
led away to uno