"Was it a fox, Patsey?" said the Master excitedly.

"I dunno, Master Freddy: it might be 'twas a hare," returned Patsey,
taking in a hurried reef in the strap that was responsible for the
support of his trousers.

Freddy was small and light, and four short years before had been a
renowned hare in his school paper-chases: he went through the wood at a
pace that gave Patsey and the puppies all they could do to keep with
him, and dropped into a road just in time to see the pack streaming up a
narrow lane near the end of the wood. At this point they were reinforced
by a yellow dachshund who, with wildly flapping ears, and at that
caricature of a gallop peculiar to his kind, joined himself to the
hunters.

"Glory be to Mercy!" exclaimed Patsey, "the misthress's dog!"

Almost simultaneously the pack precipitated themselves into a ruined
cabin at the end of the lane; instantly from within arose an uproar of
sounds--crashes of an ironmongery sort, yells of dogs, raucous human
curses; then the ruin exuded hounds, hens and turkeys at every one of
the gaps in its walls, and there issued from what had been the doorway a
tall man with a red beard, armed with a large frying-pan, with which he
rained blows on the fleeing Craffroe Pack. It must be admitted that the
speed with which these abandoned their prey, whatever it was, suggested
a very intimate acquaintance with the wrath of cooks and the perils of
resistance.

Before their lawful custodians had recovered from this spectacle, a tall
lady in black was suddenly merged in the _mêlée_, alternately calling