Through a door on the left-hand side they would drive these women, one by one, often five or six, even a dozen, in one morning. Some of them would come shuffling forward to the dock with their heads down; others walked boldly; some looked as if they must faint; some were hard and stoical as stone. They would be dressed in black, quite neatly; or in cheap, rumpled finery; or in skimped, mud-stained garments. Their faces were of every type--dark and short, with high cheek-bones; blowsy from drink; long, worn, and raddled; one here and there like a wild fruit; and many bestially insensible, devoid of any sort of beauty. They stood, as in southern countries, one may see many mules or asses, harnessed to too-heavy loads of wood or stone, stand, utterly unmoving, with a mute submissive viciousness. Now and then a girl would turn half round towards the public, her lips smiling defiantly, but her eyes never resting for a moment, as though knowing well enough there was no place where they _could_ rest. The next to her would seem smitten with a sort of deathlike shame, but there were not many of this kind, for they were those whom the beaters had driven in for the first time. Sometimes they refused to speak. As a rule they gave their answers in hard voices, their sullen eyes lowered; then, having received the meed of justice, went shuffling or flaunting out. They were used to being driven, it was their common lot; a little piece of sport growing more frequent with each year that intervened between their present and that moment when some sportsman first caught sight of them and started out to bring them down. From most of them that day was now distant by many thousand miles of pavement, so far off that it was hard work to remember it. What sport they had afforded since! Yet not one of all their faces seemed to show that they saw the fun that lay in their being driven in like this. They were perhaps still grateful, some of them, at the bottom of their hearts for that first moment when they came shyly towards the hunter, who stood holding his breath for fear they should not come; unable from their natures to believe that it was not their business to attract and afford them sport. But suddenly in a pair of greenish eyes and full lips sharpened at their corners, behind the fading paint and powder on a face, one could see the huntress--the soul as of a stealing cat, waiting to flesh its claws in what it could, driven by some deep, insatiable instinct. This one too had known sport; she had loved to spring and bring down the prey just as we who brought her here had loved to hunt her. Nature had put sport into her heart and into ours; and behind that bold or cringing face there seemed to lurk this question: “I only did what you do--what nearly every man of you has done a little, in your time. I only wanted a bit of sport, like you: that’s human nature, isn’t it? Why do you bring me here, when you don’t