es in the
rose-leaf. He was riding Mayboy, a big trustworthy horse, whose love of
jumping had survived a month of incessant and arbitrary schooling, and
he left the road as soon as was decently possible, and made a line
across country for the covert that involved as much jumping as could
reasonably be hoped for in half a mile. At the second fence Patsey
Crimmeen's black mare put her nose in the air and swung round; Patsey's
hands seemed to be at their worst this morning, and what their worst
felt like the black mare alone knew. Mr. Taylour, as Deputy Whip,
waltzed erratically round the nine couple on a very flippant polo pony;
and the four farmers, who had wisely adhered to the road, reached the
covert sufficiently in advance of the hunt to frustrate Lily's project
of running sheep in a neighbouring field.

The covert was a large, circular enclosure, crammed to the very top of
its girdling bank with furze-bushes, bracken, low hazel, and stunted
Scotch firs. Its primary idea was woodcock, its second rabbits; beaters
were in the habit of getting through it somehow, but a ride feasible for
fox hunters had never so much as occurred to it. Into this, with
practical assistance from the country boys, the deeply reluctant hounds
were pitched and flogged; Freddy very nervously uplifted his voice in
falsetto encouragement, feeling much as if he were starting the solo of
an anthem; and Mr. Taylour and Patsey, the latter having made it up with
the black mare, galloped away with professional ardour to watch
different sides of the covert. This, during the next hour, they had
ample opportunities for doing. After the first outburst of joy from the
hounds on discovering that there were rabbits in the covert, and after
the retirement of the rabbits to their burrows on the companion
discovery that there were hounds in it, a silence, broken only by the
far-away prattle of the lady bicyclists on the road, fell round Freddy
Alexander. He bore it as long as he could, cheering with faltering
whoops the invisible and unresponsive pack, and wondering what on earth
huntsmen were expected to do on such occasions; then, filled with that
horrid conviction which assails the lonely watcher, that the hounds have
slipped away at the far side, he put spurs to Mayboy, and cantered down
the long flank of the covert to find some one or something. Nothing had
happened on the north side, at all events, for there was the faithful
Taylour, pirouetting on his hi