“Now that I’ve managed for you to stay indoors, the least that you can do is to tell me about the hunting the kennel dogs took out of season,” he said, as soon as she was fairly awake. Poor Happy was heavy with sleep, but her obliging disposition conquered, though she nodded two or three times before she remembered where she left her story. “It was way back in the beginning of flea time, when Miss Letty had not been up at Hilltop very long, that she gave the kennel dogs such a holiday as some of them had never had in their whole lives, though Flo does say that it happened quite by accident. “All through the hill farms, Miss Jule’s, Squire Burley’s, and Mr. Hugh’s, there are trees that bear those big long-stemmed red berries that the birds love; cherries, I think House People call them. When I lived up there I used to watch out under the trees to see the robins and catbirds come to eat them, and laugh at poor Antonio, who used to get a stiff neck pointing at the birds up in the branches, never getting anything but the pits they dropped on his long nose. “Flo says that Miss Letty loves these cherries, and that after picking all the ripe ones she could reach from the ground and fences, one day she came riding along to gather them on horseback. The best trees were in Squire Burley’s paddock where his foxhound kennels are, and as he had often asked Miss Letty to come and help herself, she opened the gate with her whip handle, rode through and thought she closed it after her, but it didn’t quite latch. Harkaway, one of the squire’s hounds, told me this. The squire has five hounds but no one else in Dogtown, except Miss Jule and Mr. Hugh, keeps more than one each, and when they really go a-hunting in the fall the squire stands at his gate and fires his gun, then all the people know the signal and come bringing their dogs, and together they make as fine a pack as the Hilltop Kennels can show. “Miss Letty rode slowly along under the trees, now and then pulling down a branch with her whip, but she didn’t stay very long before she went out again and turned into the brush lane that runs from the squire’s down behind Miss Jule’s kennel yard toward the rabbit wood. “Then Harkaway signalled to the other hounds with the silent signal for still hunting and no cry, and they slunk out of the high paddock gate after nosing it open a little wider. Keeping behind the fence they followed Miss Letty to the back gate of Miss Jule’s kennel yard where they lay low and waited. Now those high gates have a strange fastening; the latch falls between two iron paws that move and hold it, but sometimes though the gate stays shut one paw forgets to move, and a quick nose can shove the gate before the paw remembers. That is what happened when Miss Letty opened that back kennel gate; the outside paw was stiff and did not lay hold. [Illustration: “_Pulling a branch down with her whip._”]