"Catch 'em who can," was the one mot d'ordre,
for they were literally racing; the line-hunters never losing the scent
a second, as the fox, taking to dodging, made all the trouble he could
for them through the rides of the woods. Their working was magnificent,
and, heading him, they ran him round and round in a ring, viewed him for
a second, and drove him out of covert once more into the pastures, while
they laid on at a hotter scent and flew after him like staghounds.
Only half a dozen were up with them now; the pace was tremendous, though
all over grass; here a flight of posts and rails tried the muscle of
the boldest; there a bullfinch yawned behind the blackthorn; here a big
fence towered; there a brook rushed angrily among its rushes; while the
keen, easterly wind blew over the meadows, and the pack streamed
along like the white trail of a plume. Cecil "showed the way" with the
self-same stride and the self-same fencing as had won him the Vase. Lady
Guenevere and the Seraph were running almost even with him; three of the
Household farther down; the Zu-Zu and some Melton men two meadows off;
the rest of the field, nowhere. Fifty-two minutes had gone by in that
splendid running, without a single check, while the fox raced as gamely
and as fast as at the find; the speed was like lightning past the brown
woods, the dark-green pine plantations, the hedges, bright with scarlet
berries; through the green low-lying grasslands, and the winding drives
of coverts, and the boles of ash-hued beech trunks, whose roots the
violets were just purpling with their blossom; while far away stretched
the blue haze of the distance, and above-head a flight of rooks cawed
merrily in the bright air, soon left far off as the pack swept onward in
the most brilliant thing of the hunting year.
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