“What is this young lady like?” asked the indomitable youth, as soon as they got their horses to step pleasantly together again.
“Well now,” replied Dicky, screwing up his mouth, with an apologetic touch of his hat, knowing that that was his weak point, “well now, I don’t mean to say that she’s zactly—no, not zactly, your lordship’s model,—not a large full-bodied woman like Mrs. Blissland or Miss Poach, but an elegant, _very_ elegant, well-set-up young lady, with a high-bred hair about her that one seldom sees in the country, for though we breeds our women very beautiful—uncommon ‘andsome, I may say—we don’t polish them hup to that fine degree of parfection that they do in the towns, and even if we did they would most likely spoil the ‘ole thing by some untoward unsightly dress, jest as a country servant spoils a London livery by a coloured tie, or goin’ about with a great shock head of ‘air, or some such disfigurement; but this young lady, to my mind, is a perfect pictor, self, oss, and seat,—all as neat and perfect as can be, and nothing that one could either halter or amend. She is what, savin’ your lordship’s presence, I might call the ‘pink of fashion and the mould of form!’—Dicky sawing away at his hat as he spoke.
“Tall, slim, and genteel, I suppose,” observed his lordship drily.
“Jest so,” assented Dicky, with a chuck of the chin, making a clean breast of it, “jest so,” adding, “at least as far as one can judge of her in her ‘abit, you know.”
And having now gained one of the doors in the wall, they cut across the deer-studded park, and were presently back at the Castle. And his lordship ate his dinner, and quaffed his sweet and dry and twenty-five Lafitte without ever thinking about either the horse, or the lady, or the habit, or anything connected with the foregoing conversation, while the reigning favourite, Mrs. Moffatt, appeared just as handsome as could be in his eyes.
THOUGH his lordship, as we said before, would stoutly deny being old, he had nevertheless got sufficiently through the morning of life not to let cub-hunting get him out of bed a moment sooner than usual, and it was twelve o’clock on the next day but one to that on which the foregoing conversation took place, that Mr. Boggledike was again to be seen standing erect in his stirrups, yoiking and coaxing his hounds into Crashington Gorse. There was Dicky, cap-in-hand, in the Micentre ride, exhorting the young hounds to dive into the strong sea of gorse. “_Y-o-o-icks! wind him! y-o-o-icks! pash him up!_” cheered the veteran, now turning his horse across to enforce the request. There was his lordship at the high corner as usual, ensconced among the clump of weather-beaten blackthorns—thorns that had neither advanced nor receded a single inch since he first knew them,—his eagle eye fixed on the narrow fern and coarse grass-covered dell down which Reynard generally stole. There was Harry Swan at one corner to head the fox back from the beans, and Tom Speed at the other to welcome him away over the corn-garnered open. And now the whimper of old sure-finding Harbinger, backed by the sharp “yap” of the terrier, proclaims that our friend is at home, and presently a perfect hurricane of melody bursts from the agitated gorse,—every hound is in the paroxysm of excitement, and there are five-and-twenty couple of them, fifty musicians in the whole!