denunciation for sympathy, instruction for education, and Pharisaism
for the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

1851.



CHAPTER I: THE PHILOSOPHY OF FOX-HUNTING



As this my story will probably run counter to more than one fashion
of the day, literary and other, it is prudent to bow to those
fashions wherever I honestly can; and therefore to begin with a
scrap of description.

The edge of a great fox-cover; a flat wilderness of low leafless
oaks fortified by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour
red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a
straight wood ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen
leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs;
some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young-
farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab
stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the
union, in Mackintosh and antigropelos; two holiday schoolboys with
trousers strapped down to bursting point, like a penny steamer's
safety-valve; a midshipman, the only merry one in the field, bumping
about on a fretting, sweating hack, with its nose a foot above its
ears; and Lancelot Smith, who then kept two good horses, and 'rode
forward' as a fine young fellow of three-and-twenty who can afford