ng his horn inside out. But Jerry was four fields
behind, and Sir Thomas was on the wrong side of the wood, and Miss
Muriel and the strange gentleman were coming on for all they were worth,
and were as obviously bent on having a good time as they were. Carnage
flung up her handsome head and squealed with pure joy, as she pitched
herself over the big bounds fence at the foot of the hill, and flopped
across the squashy ditch on the far side. There was grass under her now,
beautiful firm dairy grass, and that entrancing perfume was lying on it
as thick as butter--Oh! it was well to be hunting! thought Carnage, with
another most childish shriek, legging it after her father and mother and
several other blood relations in a way that did Muriel's heart good to
see.

The fox, as good luck would have it, had chosen the very pick of Sir
Thomas's country, and Muriel and the stranger had it all to themselves.
She looked over her shoulder. Away back in a half-dug potato field Nora
and a knot of labourers were engaged in bitter conflict with the foxy
mare on the subject of a bank with a rivulet in front of it. To refuse
to jump running water had been from girlhood the resolve of the foxy
mare; it was plain that neither Nora's ash plant, nor the stalks of
rag-wort, torn from the potato ridges, with which the countrymen
flagellated her from behind, were likely to make her change her mind.
Farther back still were a few specks, motionless apparently, but
representing, as Muriel was well aware, the speeding indignant forms of
those Miss Purcells who had got left. As for Sir Thomas--well, it was no
good going to meet the devil half-way! was the filial reflection; of
Sir Thomas's second daughter, as, with a clatter of stones, she and the
colt dropped into a road, and charged on over the bank on the other
side, the colt leaving a hind leg behind him in it, and sending thereby
a clod of earth flying into the stranger's face. The stranger only
laughed, and catching hold of the much enduring hireling he drove him
level with the colt, and lifted him over the ensuing bank and gripe in a
way subsequently described by Jerry as having "covered acres".

But the old fox's hitherto straight neck was getting a twist in it.
Possibly he had summered himself rather too well, and found himself a
little short of training for the point that he had first fixed on. At
all events, he swung steadily round, and headed for the lower end of the
long belt of Liss Cr