end of the holidays, and would agreeably fill in the time that could not be more thrillingly employed in the open air. He was not sure that he would even want to go up to London for the few nights' play-going that had been suggested. There would be quite enough to do at Abington, which seemed to him about the jolliest place that could be found in England, which to an incipient John Bull like Young George naturally meant the world. The meet was to be at Wilborough. The whole Grafton family turned out for it. George Grafton had hunted regularly two days a week with the South Meadshire since the opening of the season, and the three girls had been almost as regular, though they had all of them been away on visits for various periods during the autumn. Young George felt proud of his sisters, as he saw them all mounted. He had not thought that they would show up so well in circumstances not before familiar. But they all looked as if horses had been as much part of their environment as they had been of the Pemberton girls, though in their young grace and beauty, which neither hats nor habits could disguise, not so much as if it had been their only environment. There are few scenes of English country life more familiar than a meet of hounds, but it can scarcely ever fail to arouse pleasure in contemplation. It is something so peculiarly English in its high seriousness over a matter not of essential importance, and its gathering together of so many who have the opportunities to make what they will of their lives and choose this ordered and ancient excitement of the chase as among the best that life can offer them. If the best that can be said for it in some quarters is that it keeps the idle rich out of mischief for the time being, it is a good deal to say. The idle rich can accomplish an enormous amount of mischief, as well as the rich who are not idle, and perhaps accomplish rather less in England than elsewhere. For a nation of sportsmen is at least in training for more serious things than sport, and courage and bodily hardness, some self-discipline, and readiness to risk life and limb, are attributes that are not to be gained from every form of pleasure. There was not a boy or a young man among all those who gathered in front of Wilborough House on that mild winter morning to enjoy themselves who did not come up to the great test a few years later. The pleasures, and even the selfishness, of their lives were all cast behind them without a murmur; they were ready and more than ready to serve.