imbecile
friendliness they remained to lick his face and generally make merry
over him as he struggled to his feet.

By this time the leaders of the pack were well away up a ploughed field,
over a fence and into a furze brake, from which their rejoicing yelps
streamed back on the damp breeze. The Master of the Craffroe Hounds
picked himself up, and sprinted up the hill after the Whip and Kennel
Huntsman--a composite official recently promoted from the stable
yard--in a way that showed that his failure in horn-blowing was not the
fault of his lungs. His feet were held by the heavy soil, he tripped in
the muddy ridges; none the less he and Patsey plunged together over the
stony rampart of the field in time to see Negress and Lily springing
through the furze in kangaroo leaps, while they uttered long squeals of
ecstasy. The rest of the pack, with a confidence gained in many a
successful riot, got to them as promptly as if six Whips were behind
them, and the whole faction plunged into a little wood on the top of
what was evidently a burning scent.

"Was it a fox, Patsey?" said the Master excitedly.

"I dunno, Master Freddy: it might be 'twas a hare," returned Patsey,
taking in a hurried reef in the strap that was responsible for the
support of his trousers.

Freddy was small and light, and four short years before had been a
renowned hare in his school paper-chases: he went through the wood at a
pace that gave Patsey and the puppies all they could do to keep with
him, and dropped into a road just in time to see the pack streaming up a
narrow lane near the end of the wood. At this point they were reinforced
by a yellow dachshund who, with wildly flapping ears, and at that
caricature of a gallop peculiar to his kind, joined himself to the
hunters.

"Glory be to Mercy!" exclaimed Patsey, "the misthress's dog!"

Almost simultaneously the pack precipitated themselves into a ruined
cabin at the end of the lane; instantly from within arose an uproar of
sounds--crashes of an ironmongery sort, yells of dogs, raucous human
curses; then the ruin exuded hounds, hens and turkeys at every one of
the gaps in its walls, and there issued from what had been the doorway a
tall man with a red beard, armed with a large frying-pan, with which he
rained blows on the fleeing Craffroe Pack. It must be admitted that the
speed with which these abandoned their prey, whatever it was, suggested
a very intimate acquaintance with the wrath of cooks