?"

"Not by a jugful!" I returned. "Add that I hope to get there too, and
will make every effort to do so."

He wrote it out, sighing as he did so. Then, by careful cutting, he got
it down to fourteen words. By that time the operator couldn't read it,
so he wrote it out again--gloomily.

This accomplished, we matched coins to see who should pay for the
message. He lost.

"All right!" he said. "I'll pay for it, but it's all foolishness to send
such a long telegram."

"No," I returned, as we left the office and got into the machine, "it is
not foolishness. If I can make life a little brighter for a beautiful
woman, by adding a few words to a telegram, and sticking you for it, I
shall do it every time."

He looked away over the fields and did not answer me. So we drove on in
silence to where stands the beautiful manor house called Huntland, which
is the residence of Mr. Joseph B. Thomas, M.F.H. of the Piedmont Hunt.

There is, I have been told, no important hunt in the United States in
which the master of foxhounds is not the chief financial supporter, the
sport being a very costly one. Of American hunts, the Middlesex, in
Massachusetts, of which Mr. A. Henry Higginson is M.F.H., has the
reputation of being the best appointed. The Piedmont Hunt is, however,
one of the half dozen leading organizations of the kind, and it is
difficult indeed to imagine a finer.

In a well-kept park near Mr. Thomas's house stand extensive
English-looking buildings of brick and stucco, which, viewed from a
distance, suggest a beautiful country house, and which, visited, teach
one that certain favored hounds and horses in this world live much
better than certain human beings. One building is given over to the
kennels, the other the stables; each has a large sunlit court, and each
is as beautiful and as clean as a fine house--a house full of trophies,
hunting equipment, and the pleasant smell of well-cared-for saddlery. In
a rolling meadow, not far distant, is the race course, all green turf,
and here, soon after luncheon, gathered an extraordinary diversified
crowd.

For the most part the crowd was a fashionable one: men and women of the
type whose photographs appear in "Vogue" and "Vanity Fair," and whose
costumes were like fashion suggestions for "sport clothes" in those
publications. One party was stationed on the top of an old-time mail
coach, the boot of which bore the significant initials
"F.F.V."--standing, as even benighted