“He’s gone south this five minutes!  I was out spreadin’ clothes, and I seen him circling round the Kerry cow, and he as big as a man!” screamed the girl.

“He was, the thief!” yelled the old woman.  “I seen him firsht on the hill, cringeing behind a rock, and he hardly able to thrail the tail afther him!”

“Run now, like a good girl, and show me where did he cross the fence,” said old Robert, puffing and blowing, as with a purple face he hurried into the yard to collect the hounds, who, like practised foragers, had already overrun the farmhouse, as was evidenced by an indignant and shrieking flight of fowls through the open door.

The girl ran, snatching off her red plaid shawl as she went.

“Here’s the shpot now!” she called out, flinging the shawl down on the fence; “here’s the very way just that he wint!  Go south to the gap; I’ll pull the pole out for ye—­this is a cross place.”

The hunt gratefully accepted her good offices.  She tore the monstrous shaft of a cart out of a place that with it was impossible, and without it was a boggy scramble, and as we began to gallop again, I began to think there was a good deal to be said in favour of the New Woman.

I suppose we had had another quarter of an hour, when the mist, that had been hanging about all day, came down on us, and it was difficult to see more than a field ahead.  We had got down on to lower ground, and we were in a sort of marshy hollow when we were confronted by the most serious obstacle of the day:  a tall and obviously rotten bank clothed in briars, with sharp stones along its top, a wide ditch in front of it, and a disgustingly squashy take-off.  Robert Trinder and the yellow horse held their course undaunted:  the rest of the field turned as one man, and went for another way round—­I, in my arrogance, followed the Master.  The yellow horse rose out of the soft ground with quiet, indescribable ease, got a foothold on the side of the bank for his hind legs, and was away into the next field without pause or mistake.

“Go round, Captain!” shouted Trinder; “it’s a bad place!”

I hardly heard him; I was already putting the filly at it for the second time.  It took about three minutes for her to convince me that she and Robert were right, and I was wrong, and by that time everybody was out of sight, swallowed up in the mist.  I tried round after the others, and found their footmarks up a lane and across a field; a loose stone wall confronted me, and I rode at it confidently; but the filly, soured by our recent encounter, reared and would have none of it.  I tried yet another way round, and put her at a moderate and seemingly innocuous bank, at which, with the contrariety of her sex, she rushed at a thousand miles an hour.  It looked somehow as if there might be a bit of a drop, but the filly had got her beastly blood up, and I have been in a better temper myself.