Mr. Sawyer smiled his gratitude, as he opened a gate for the lady, and very nearly let it swing back against her knees. He had not acquired sufficient practice yet at his gates, that’s the truth; and perhaps there were other portals wherein his inexperience had better have forbidden him to venture. Miss Dove was fast luring him into a country which, to use a hunting metaphor, was very cramped and blind, full of “doubles,” “squire-traps,” and other pit-falls for the unwary.
Hounds are apt to be a little unsettled after so rapid a burst as I have attempted to describe, and it takes a few fields of persevering attention to steady them again. After this, however, I think we may have remarked they made but few mistakes, and a fox well rattled, up to the first check, huntsmen tell us, is as good as half killed.
The description of a run is tedious to all but the narrator. What good wine a man should give his guests, who indulges in minute details of every event that happened!—how they entered this spinny, and skirted that wood, and crossed the common, and finally killed or lost, or ran to ground, or otherwise put an end to the proceedings of which the reality is so engrossing and the account so tedious. I have seen young men, longing to join the ladies, or pining for their cigars, forced to sit smothering their yawns as they pretended to take an interest in the hounds and the huntsman, and the country, and their host’s own doings, and that eternal black mare. I can stand it well enough myself, with a fair allowance of ’41 or ’44, by abstracting my attention completely from the narrative, and wandering in the realms of fancy, cheered by the blushing fluid. But every one may not enjoy this faculty, and you cannot, in common decency, go fast asleep in your Amphitryon’s face. Again, I say, nothing but good wine will wash the infliction down. Let him, then, whose port is new, or whose claret unsound, beware how he thus trespasses on the forbearance of his guests.
Of course they killed their fox. After the first check they gradually took to hunting, and so to running once more, Mr. Sawyer distinguishing himself by describing a very perfect semicircle with Hotspur, over some rails near Stanford Hall. The roan was tired, and his rider ambitious, so a downfall was the inevitable result. Nevertheless, he fell honourably enough, and hoped no one but himself knew how completely the accident was occasioned by utter exhaustion on the part of his steed.