A gallant show it is by the wood!  Horsemen and horsewomen, late comers hastening up, restless horses, a throng for ever in motion, and every now and then the blast of a horn rising up from the trees beneath.  A gallant show indeed, but two old cunning ones and their followers have slipped away down to this obscure corner where they can see nothing of it, and are themselves hidden.  They know that the wood is triangular in shape, and that from this, the apex, they have merely to pass the low hedge in front, and, turning to the left, ride along the lower side, and so bisect the course the fox will probably take.  They know that the ‘drive,’ which offers so straight and easy a descent through the wood from the park, is pleasant enough till the lower ground is reached.  There the soft, oozy earth, which can never dry under the trees, is poached into a slough through which even timber carriages cannot be drawn.  Nor can a horseman slip aside, because of the ash poles and thorn thickets.  Those who are trapped there must return to the park and gallop all round the wood outside, unless they like to venture a roll in that liquid mud.  Any one can go to a meet, but to know all the peculiarities of the covers is only given to those who have ridden over the country these forty years.  In this corner a detached copse of spruce fir keeps off the wind—­the direction of which they have noted—­and in this shelter it is almost warm.

The distant crack of a whip, the solitary cry of a hound, a hollow shout, and similar sounds, come frequently, and now and then there is an irrepressible stir in the little group as they hear one of the many false alarms that always occur in drawing a great wood.  To these noises they are keenly sensitive, but utterly ignore the signs of other life around them.  A pheasant, alarmed by the hounds, comes running quietly, thinking to escape into the line of isolated copses that commences here; but, suddenly confronted by the horsemen just outside, rises with an uproar, and goes sailing down over the fields.  Two squirrels, happy in the mild weather, frisk out of the copse into the dank grass, till a curvet of one of the horses frightens them up into the firs again.

Horses and men are becoming impatient.  ’That dalled keeper has left an earth open,’ remarks one of the riders.  His companion points with his whip at the hedge just where it joins the wood.  A long slender muzzle is thrust for a moment cautiously over the bare sandy mound under cover of a thorn stole.  One sniff, and it is withdrawn.  The fox thought also to steal away along the copses, the worst and most baffling course he could choose.  Five minutes afterwards, and there is this time no mistake.  There comes from the park above the low, dull, rushing roar of hundreds of hoofs, that strike the sward together, and force by sheer weight the reluctant earth to resound.  The two old hands lead over the hedge, and the little company, slipping along below the wood, find themselves well on the track, far in front of the main body.  There is a block in the treacherous ‘drive,’ those who where foremost struggling to get back, and those behind struggling to come down.  The rest at last, learning the truth, are galloping round the outside, and taking it out of their horses before they get on the course at all.