The annual hunt-dinner is a great day for the Secretary. On that occasion he takes the vice-chair, and proposes the health of Sir John, the Master, in a speech which poor Mrs. B. has to listen to off and on for the three previous days. Once the meek little woman did rebel. The speech she had put up with, but when her lord and master returned home at two o'clock, exceedingly jovial, and kept her awake till six o'clock by alternately treating her to "John Peel," and informing her, with a somewhat foolish laugh, that "they called me besht f'ller in shworld, drunk m'very good shealth, 'pon m'shoul," she thought it was a little too much; and when the orator awoke next day, headachey, chippy, and penitent, she gave him a piece of her mind which so astonished him that he has never exceeded again, and now returns at eleven sharp.
Sometimes during the summer months Boulter is to be seen struggling with a pile of luggage at a foreign railway station, looking as miserable as a man can look, and heavily handicapped as to the language of the country in which his wife has elected to travel. But the trip never lasts long. Some business connected with the hunt invariably calls him back, and on a hot August day you will find him at the kennels chatting with Tom Wilding over the prospects of the coming season or the young entry, and anxiously longing for the "beastly harvest" to be over, and for November leaves to fall.
If not there he will be riding round looking up Velveteens and his satellites, and endeavouring to imbue them with the motto of "Live and let live," as applicable to the fox.
"Like master like man" is a very old saying, and, like many of those ancient saws, very true. Therefore, in such a sporting country as the Bullshire, with such a sporting Master at the head of affairs, it stands to reason that the field, or at all events the majority of them, should be equally imbued with the love of the chase. Now in every country the mainstay and backbone of the hunt is the Farmer, for without his consent and co-operation fox-hunting would become a thing of the past, and instead of a series of brilliant gallops and a successful season, we should read of a series of actions for trespass and verdicts for damages, carrying costs.