the park-gate we stream away, down the fir avenue,
along the Welsh Ride. We have got a splendid start, and our horses fly
on beside Countess Morella, who looks the perfection of a hunting lady
in her plain neat habit just down to her feet.

Reynard is making for Coombes's Wood, but the earths were all stopped
this morning at four o'clock; so away he speeds again, leaving the
rectory and its lovely meadows and the dear old church below us--away
past the bogs where the cotton-grass and the flycatcher, the blue
gentian and the yellow asphodel, grow among the treacherous
tussocks--away to Eversley Wood. Here the same fate--a fagot or three or
four sods in the mouth of each hole--awaits him; so, changing his
tactics, he strikes boldly across Hartfordbridge Flats for Lord
Calthorpe's woods at Elvetham.

And now woe to the unwary or to the newcomer who thinks our
heather-covered moors are all plain sailing! for along them run long
lines of ruts, the remains of the old pack-road of the Middle Ages, worn
by the traffic of centuries and now covered deep in purple heath. The
only way to get over them, unless you stop and walk, is to jump boldly
into the middle like the man in the nursery rhyme, and then jump out
again: horses that have been in the country for a while soon learn to do
this. But some luckless ensign who has lately joined his regiment at
Aldershot comes down bodily, and horse and man roll and struggle in the
deep ruts which William the Conqueror's pack-horses helped to tread out
as they came from London to Winchester.

Now the woods are drawing near, and we cross the old London road, the
high-road between the metropolis and Southampton, along which ninety
stagecoaches ran every day in the good old times. A mile off to our
right, down Star Hill, lies the famous White Lion Inn, now a miserable
pot-house, where George IV. used to stay, and where, on the day that the
London and South-western Railway was opened, the old ostler cut his
throat in sheer despair, for Othello's occupation was gone. Ten miles
up the road lies Bagshot Heath, the terror of travellers in those
coaching days. There stood, and stands still, a little wayside inn
called the Golden Farmer, where many of the coaches stopped to water the
horses. The wearied travellers of the end of last century, touched by
the tender solicitude of the charming landlord, confided to his
sympathetic ear their fears of the highwaymen who were said to infest
the heath. Ch