long, breezy, sweeping, unenclosed piece of ground, called, as I
afterwards learnt, a Chase. The groom stopped, breathed, patted his
horse, and then mounted again to my side.

"Are we near Hanbury Court?" I asked.

"Near! Why, Miss! we've a matter of ten mile yet to go."

Once launched into conversation, we went on pretty glibly. I fancy he
had been afraid of beginning to speak to me, just as I was to him; but he
got over his shyness with me sooner than I did mine with him. I let him
choose the subjects of conversation, although very often I could not
understand the points of interest in them: for instance, he talked for
more than a quarter of an hour of a famous race which a certain dog-fox
had given him, above thirty years before; and spoke of all the covers and
turns just as if I knew them as well as he did; and all the time I was
wondering what kind of an animal a dog-fox might be.

After we loft the Chase, the road grew worse. No one in these days, who
has not seen the byroads of fifty years ago, can imagine what they were.
We had to quarter, as Randal called it, nearly all the way along the deep-
rutted, miry lanes; and the tremendous jolts I occasionally met with made
my seat in the gig so unsteady that I could not look about me at all, I
was so much occupied in holding on. The road was too muddy for me to
walk without dirtying myself more than I liked to do, just before my
first sight of my Lady Ludlow. But by-and-by, when we came to the fields
in which the lane ended, I begged Randal to help me down, as I saw that I
could pick my steps among the pasture grass without making myself unfit
to be seen; and Randal, out of pity for his steaming horse, wearied with
the hard struggle through the mud, thanked me kindly, and helped me down