the hour of the night, all called for the weird or uncanny, then out
spoke the ex-master of foxhounds and told this tale.

I once had an odd experience too. It was when I had the Bromley and
Sydenham, the year I gave them up--as a matter of fact it was the last
day of the season. It was no use going on because there were no foxes
left in the county, and London was sweeping down on us. You could see
it from the kennels all along the skyline like a terrible army in
grey, and masses of villas every year came skirmishing down our
valleys. Our coverts were mostly on the hills, and as the town came
down upon the valleys the foxes used to leave them and go right away
out of the county and they never returned. I think they went by night
and moved great distances. Well it was early April and we had drawn
blank all day, and at the last draw of all, the very last of the
season, we found a fox. He left the covert with his back to London and
its railways and villas and wire and slipped away towards the chalk
country and open Kent. I felt as I once felt as a child on one
summer's day when I found a door in a garden where I played left
luckily ajar, and I pushed it open and the wide lands were before me
and waving fields of corn.

We settled down into a steady gallop and the fields began to drift by
under us, and a great wind arose full of fresh breath. We left the
clay lands where the bracken grows and came to a valley at the edge of
the chalk. As we went down into it we saw the fox go up the other side
like a shadow that crosses the evening, and glide into a wood that
stood on the top. We saw a flash of primroses in the wood and we were
out the other side, hounds hunting perfectly and the fox still going
absolutely straight. It began to dawn on me then that we were in for a
great hunt, I took a deep breath when I thought of it; the taste of