“Then in about ten days, which was days of peace for brother and sister, because they didn’t have to go in keenly for any new way of killing themselves off, what comes up but several crates of beagles, in charge of their valet or tutor!  I’d looked forward to something of a thrilling or unknown character, and they turned out to be mere dogs; just little brown-and-white dogs that you wouldn’t notice if you hadn’t been excited by their names; kind of yapping mutts that some parties would poison off if they lived in the same neighbourhood with ’em.  They all had names like Rex II and Lady Blessington, and so on; and each one had cost more than any three steers I had on the place.  What do you think of that?  They was yapping in their kennels when I first seen ’em, with the old lady as excited as they was, and brother and sister trying to look excited in order to please mother, and at least looking relieved because no fatalities was in immediate prospect.

“I listened to the noise a while and acted nice by saying they was undoubtedly the very finest beagles I’d ever laid eyes on—­which was the simple God’s truth; and then I says won’t she take one out of the cage and let him beagle some, me not having any idea what it would be like?  But the old lady says not yet, because the costumes ain’t come.  I thought at first it was the pups that had to be dressed up, but it seems it was costumes for her and brother and sister to wear; so I asked a few more silly questions and found out the mystery.  It seemed the secret of a beagle’s existence was rabbits.  Yes, sir; they was mad about rabbits and went in keenly for ’em.  Only they wouldn’t notice one, I gathered, if the parties that followed ’em wasn’t dressed proper for it.

“Then we went in where we could hear each other without screaming, and the lady tells me more about it, and how beagles is her last hope of her chits ever amounting to anything in the great world of sport.  If they don’t go in keenly for beagles she’ll just have to give up and let Nature take its course with the poor things.  And she said these was A-Number-One beagles, being sure to get a rabbit if one was in the country.  She’d just had ’em at a big fashionable country resort down South, some place where the sport attracted much notice from the simple-minded peasantry, and it hadn’t been a good country for rabbits; so the beagles had trooped into a backyard and destroyed a Belgian hare that had belonged to a little boy, whose father come out and swore at the costumed hunters in a very common manner, and offered to lick any three of ’em at once.

“And in hurrying acrost a field to get away from this rowdy, that seemed liable to forget himself and do something they’d all regret later, they was put up a tree by a bull that was sensitive about costumes, and had to stay there two hours, with the bull trying to grub up the tree, and would of done so if his owner hadn’t come along and rescued ’em.