Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) IN THE VINE COUNTRY IN THE VINE COUNTRY BY E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS AUTHORS OF ‘THROUGH CONNEMARA IN A GOVERNESS CART, ETC. [Illustration: E. Œ. Somerville] _ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. H. TOWNSEND_ _FROM SKETCHES BY E. Œ. SOMERVILLE_ LONDON W. H. ALLEN & CO. LIMITED 13 WATERLOO PLACE S.W. 1893 _The following pages, with their accompanying Illustrations, originally appeared in the columns of ‘The Lady’s Pictorial,’ and are here reprinted by permission of the Proprietors._ IN THE VINE COUNTRY CHAPTER I. It was our first day’s cub-hunting, and things had been going against us from the outset. To begin with, we had started rather late,--it is noticeable that the minutes between five and six A.M. are fewer and closer together than they are at any other period of the day,--and, when half way to the meet we found that Betty had given way to her sporting proclivities, and had surreptitiously followed us. When it is explained that Betty is a St. Bernard puppy of cart-horse dimensions, whose expression of smiling imbecility only cloaks a will of iron, it will be understood that there was trouble before us. The trouble began at once. Directly she saw she was discovered she ran away, and the next time we saw her she was three fields ahead of us, lumbering cheerfully into covert at the heels of the hounds, pursued by several cows and the curses of the master. [Illustration: BETTY.] By the time that she had been caught and immured in the bedroom of the nearest cottage, we were covered with confusion and blazing with heat, and while we were precariously scrambling on to our horses’ backs by the help of the pigstye door, we were told by an excited old man that the hounds had found, and were ‘firing away like the divil’ out of the far side of the wood. This happened to be one of those statements that are founded not so much on fact as on a desire to keep things stirring and pleasant, but none the less did it send us at inconvenient speed to the other side of the covert, there to find that the hounds had never left it, and were hunting slowly back towards the side from which we had just come.