As he sat revolving these things in his mind, he suddenly heard a rushing sound, as of many horsemen down the avenue, and going to the window, he saw two or three leading men of the hunt, accompanied by the gray-haired old huntsman; and through and about and under the horsemen were the dogs, running in and out of the laurels which skirted the road, with their noses down, giving every now and then short yelps as they caught up the uncertain scent from the leaves on the ground, and hurried on upon the trail of their game. "Yo ho! to him, Messenger; hark to him, Maybird; good bitch, Merrylass. He's down here, gen'lemen, and he'll never get away alive. He came to a bad place when he looked out for going to ground anywhere near Mr. Owen." And then there came, fast trotting down through the other horsemen, making his way eagerly to the front, a stout heavy man, with a florid handsome face and eager eye. He might be some fifty years of age, but no lad there of three-and-twenty was so anxious and impetuous as he. He was riding a large-boned, fast-trotting bay horse, that pressed on as eagerly as his rider. As he hurried forward all made way for him, till he was close to the shrubs in the front of the house. "Bless my soul, gentlemen," he said, in an angry voice, "how, in the name of all that's good, are hounds to hunt if you press them down the road in that way? By heavens, Barry, you are enough to drive a man wild. Yoicks, Merrylass! there it is, Pat;"--Pat was the huntsman--"outside the low wall there, down towards the river." This was Sam O'Grady, the master of the Duhallow hounds, the god of Owen's idolatry. No better fellow ever lived, and no master of hounds, so good; such at least was the opinion common among Duhallow sportsmen. "Yes, yer honer,--he did skirt round there, I knows that; but he's been among them laurels at the bottom, and he'll be about the place and outhouses somewhere. There's a drain here that I knows on, and he knows on. But Mr. Owen, he knows on it too; and there aint a chance for him." So argued Pat, the Duhallow huntsman, the experienced craft of whose aged mind enabled him to run counter to the cutest dodges of the cutest fox in that and any of the three neighbouring baronies.