TheCompleteMemoirsOfGeorgeSherston

Memories within memories; those red and black
and brown coated riders return to me now without
any beckoning, bringing along with them the wintry
smelling freshness of the woods and fields. And how
could I forget them, those evergreen country charac-
ters whom once I learnt to know by heart, and to
whom I have long since waved my last farewell (as
though at the end of a rattling good day). Sober-
faced squires, with their civil greetings and knowing
eyes for the run of a fox; the landscape belonged to
them and they to the homely landscape. Weather-
beaten farmers, for whom the activities of the Hunt
were genial interludes in the stubborn succession of
good or bad seasons out of which they made a living
on their low-lying clay or wind-swept dowiiland acres.
These people were the pillars of the Hunt—the land-
owners and the farmers. The remainder were merely
subscribers; and a rich-flavoured collection of charac-
ters they were, although I only half-recognized them
as such while I was with them.

There was loquacious old Mr. Dearborn; formerly
a none-too-successful stockbroker, and now. a gentle-
man of leisure, who enjoyed himself on a couple of
spavined screws which (he continually asserted) were
worth at least a couple of hundred apiece and as
clever as cats, though he'd never given more than
thirty pounds for a horse, and rarely went as high as
that; both of them, as Stephen said, looked lonely
without a gig behind them. Old Dearborn jabbered
his way through the days, attaching himself to one
group of riders after another until a fox was found;
at the end of a good hunt he would always turn up
again, puffing and blowing and purple in the face,
but voluble with enthusiasm for the way his horse
had got over "one of the ugliest places you ever saw

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