at a time. Wat Danbury took the lead, and he
heard the huntsman's horse clumping along heavily behind him, while his
own mare was going with less spring than when she had started. She
answered to a touch of his crop or spur, however, and he felt that there
was something still left to draw upon. And then he looked up, and there
was a heavy wooden stile at the end of the narrow track, with a lane of
stiff young saplings leading down to it, which was far too thick to
break through. The hounds were running clear upon the grassland on the
other side, and you were bound either to get over that stile or lose
sight of them, for the pace was too hot to let you go round.

"Well, Wat Danbury was not the lad to flinch, and at it he went full
split, like a man who means what he is doing. She rose gallantly to it,
rapped it hard with her front hoof, shook him on to her withers,
recovered herself, and was over. Wat had hardly got back into his
saddle when there was a clatter behind him like the fall of a woodstack,
and there was the top bar in splinters, the horse on its belly, and the
huntsman on hands and knees half a dozen yards in front of him.
Wat pulled up for an instant, for the fall was a smasher; but he saw old
Joe spring to his feet and get to his horse's bridle. The horse
staggered up, but the moment it put one foot in front of the other, Wat
saw that it was hopelessly lame--a slipped shoulder and a six weeks'
job. There was nothing he could do, and Joe was shouting to him not to
lose the hounds, so off he went again, the one solitary survivor of the
whole hunt. When a man finds himself there, he can retire from
fox-hunting, for he has tasted the highest which it has to offer.
I remember once when I was out with the Royal Surrey--but I'll tell you
that story afterwards.

"The pack, or what was left of them, had got a bit ahead during this
time; but he had a clear view of them on the downland, and the mare
seemed full of pride at being the only one left, for she was stepping
out rarely and tossing her head as she went. They were two miles over
the green shoulder of a hill, a rattle down a stony, deep-rutted country
lane, where the mare stumbled and nearly came down, a jump over a 5ft.
brook, a cut through a hazel copse, another dose of heavy ploughland, a
couple of gates to open, and then the green, unbroken Downs beyond.

"'Well,' said Wat Danbury to himself, 'I'll see this fox run into or I
shall see it drowned