natural-history books by Mr. Surtees, on the table beside the sofa. At
first they looked upon him coolly, but when the tale of the removed wire
and the recaptured gorse had gone the rounds, they accepted him for a
person willing to play their games. True, a faction suspended judgment
for a while, because they shot, and hoped that Midmore would serve the
glorious mammon of pheasant-raising rather than the unkempt god of
fox-hunting. But after he had shown his choice, they did not ask by what
intellectual process he had arrived at it. He hunted three, sometimes
four, times a week, which necessitated not only one bay gelding (L94:
10s.), but a mannerly white-stockinged chestnut (L114), and a black
mare, rather long in the back but with a mouth of silk (L150), who so
evidently preferred to carry a lady that it would have been cruel to
have baulked her. Besides, with that handling she could be sold at a
profit. And besides, the hunt was a quiet, intimate, kindly little hunt,
not anxious for strangers, of good report in the _Field_, the servant of
one M.F.H., given to hospitality, riding well its own horses, and, with
the exception of Midmore, not novices. But as Miss Sperrit observed,
after the M.F.H. had said some things to him at a gate: 'It _is_ a pity
you don't know as much as your horse, but you will in time. It takes
years and yee-ars. I've been at it for fifteen and I'm only just
learning. But you've made a decent kick-off.'

So he kicked off in wind and wet and mud, wondering quite sincerely why
the bubbling ditches and sucking pastures held him from day to day, or
what so-lace he could find on off days in chasing grooms and
brick-layers round outhouses.

To make sure he up-rooted himself one week-end of heavy mid-winter rain,
and re-entered his lost world in the character of Galahad fresh from a
rest-cure. They all agreed, with an eye over his shoulder for the next
comer, that he was a different man; but when they asked him for the
symptoms of nervous strain, and led him all through their own, he
realised he had lost much of his old skill in lying. His three months'
absence, too, had put him hopelessly behind the London field. The
movements, the allusions, the slang of the game had changed. The couples
had rearranged themselves or were re-crystallizing in fresh triangles,
whereby he put his foot in it badly. Only one great soul (he who had
written the account of the pig-pound episode) stood untouched by the
vast f