He looked away over the fields and did not answer me.  So we drove on in silence to where stands the beautiful manor house called Huntland, which is the residence of Mr. Joseph B. Thomas, M.F.H. of the Piedmont Hunt.

There is, I have been told, no important hunt in the United States in which the master of foxhounds is not the chief financial supporter, the sport being a very costly one.  Of American hunts, the Middlesex, in Massachusetts, of which Mr. A. Henry Higginson is M.F.H., has the reputation of being the best appointed.  The Piedmont Hunt is, however, one of the half dozen leading organizations of the kind, and it is difficult indeed to imagine a finer.

In a well-kept park near Mr. Thomas’s house stand extensive English-looking buildings of brick and stucco, which, viewed from a distance, suggest a beautiful country house, and which, visited, teach one that certain favored hounds and horses in this world live much better than certain human beings.  One building is given over to the kennels, the other the stables; each has a large sunlit court, and each is as beautiful and as clean as a fine house—­a house full of trophies, hunting equipment, and the pleasant smell of well-cared-for saddlery.  In a rolling meadow, not far distant, is the race course, all green turf, and here, soon after luncheon, gathered an extraordinary diversified crowd.

For the most part the crowd was a fashionable one:  men and women of the type whose photographs appear in “Vogue” and “Vanity Fair,” and whose costumes were like fashion suggestions for “sport clothes” in those publications.  One party was stationed on the top of an old-time mail coach, the boot of which bore the significant initials “F.F.V.”—­standing, as even benighted Northerners must be aware, for “First Families of Virginia”; others were in a line of motors and heterogeneous horse-drawn vehicles, parked beside the course; and scattered through the gathering, like brushmarks on an impressionist canvas, one saw the brilliant color of pink coats.  Handsome hunters were being ridden or led about by negro grooms, and others kept arriving, ridden in by farmers and breeders, while here and there one saw a woman rider, her hair tightly drawn back under a mannish derby hat, her figure slender and graceful in a severely-cut habit coat.  Jumbled together in a great green meadow under a sweet autumnal sun, these things made a picture of what, I am persuaded, is the ultimate in extravagant American country life.  There was something, too, about this blending of fashionables and farmers, which made me think of the theater; for there is, in truth, a distinct note of histrionism about many of the rich Americans who “go in for” elaborate ruralness, and there is a touch of it very often, also, about “horsey” people.  They like to “look the part,” and they dress it with no less care than they exercise, at other seasons, in dressing the parts of opera-going cosmopolites, or wealthy loungers at the beaches.  In other words, these fashionables had the overtrained New York look all over them, and the local rustics set them off as effectively as the villainous young squire of the Drury Lane melodrama is set off by contrast with honest old Jasper, the miller, who wears a smock, and comes to the Great House to beg the Young Master to “make an honest woman” of poor Rose, the fairest lass in all Hampshire.