And now the men settled themselves to the work, and began to strive for the pride of place, at least the younger portion of them:  for in every field there are two classes of men.  Those who go out to get the greatest possible quantity of riding, and those whose object is to get the least.  Those who go to work their nags, and those who go to spare them.  The former think that the excellence of the hunt depends on the horses; the latter, on the dogs.  The former go to act, and the latter to see.  And it is very generally the case that the least active part of the community know the most about the sport.

They, the less active part above alluded to, know every high-road and bye-road; they consult the wind, and calculate that a fox won’t run with his nose against it; they remember this stream and this bog, and avoid them; they are often at the top of eminences, and only descend when they see which way the dogs are going; they take short cuts, and lay themselves out for narrow lanes; they dislike galloping, and eschew leaping; and yet, when a hard-riding man is bringing up his two hundred guinea hunter, a minute or two late for the finish, covered with foam, trembling with his exertion, not a breath left in him—­he’ll probably find one of these steady fellows there before him, mounted on a broken-down screw, but as cool and as fresh as when he was brought out of the stable; and what is, perhaps, still more amazing, at the end of the day, when the hunt is canvassed after dinner, our dashing friend, who is in great doubt whether his thoroughbred steeplechaser will ever recover his day’s work, and who has been personally administering warm mashes and bandages before he would venture to take his own boots off, finds he does not know half as much about the hunt, or can tell half as correctly where the game went, as our, quiet-going friend, whose hack will probably go out on the following morning under the car, with the mistress and children.  Such a one was Parson Armstrong; and when Lord Ballindine and most of the others went away after the hounds, he coolly turned round in a different direction, crept through a broken wall into a peasant’s garden, and over a dunghill, by the cabin door into a road, and then trotted along as demurely and leisurely as though he were going to bury an old woman in the next parish.

Frank was, generally speaking, as good-natured a man as is often met, but even he got excited and irritable when hunting his own pack.  All masters of hounds do.  Some one was always too forward, another too near the dogs, a third interfering with the servants, and a fourth making too much noise.

“Confound it, Peter,” he said, when they had gone over a field or two, and the dogs missed the scent for a moment, “I thought at any rate you knew better than to cross the dogs that way.”

“Who crossed the dogs?” said the other—­“what nonsense you’re talking:  why I wasn’t out of the potato-field till they were nearly all at the next wall.”