Not long after this my second cousin lost her temper, and said she hated cubbing, and wished she was back in Connemara, or anywhere out of the county Cork. This expression of opinion occurred when she was picking herself up out of a potato furrow, into which she and her horse had ingloriously rolled, and it was a good deal embittered by the fact that she had hurt her knee, torn her habit, and broken her hunting crop. The day ended with this incident, so far, at least, as we were concerned. Betty was released from the captivity that she had not ceased to bewail in quivering, infantine shrieks, and we turned our faces toward home. There is something very humbling in coming in at ten o’clock to a late edition of the family breakfast, with nothing to justify the routing up of the household at five A.M. except a torn habit and a bruised knee; and we said to each other, as we went unostentatiously up the back stairs, that cubbing was not worth the candle by which one had to get up to be in time for it. We did not know that a few days afterwards we should be hanging out of the window of the train as, at a painfully early hour, it passed a covert in the vicinity, straining jaundiced eyes of jealousy at the distant specks that represented the field and the hounds--specks who were to remain in the county Cork and go out cubbing, instead of faring forth, as we were doing, to take our pleasure in foreign lands. The letter that we found on the dining-room table, when we came down-stairs on that day that had [Illustration: MY SECOND COUSIN LOST HER TEMPER.] been sacrificed to Betty, was responsible for this unexpected change of circumstances. It said majestically, ‘You are to go to the vineyards of the Médoc, and must start at once in order to be in time for the vintage;’ and in spite of a grand and complete ignorance of Médoc, its vintages, and wines in general, we accepted the position with calm, even with satisfaction. The gibes of our friends were many and untiring, and were the harder to bear that we felt a secret scepticism as to our fitness for this large and yet delicate mission,--what did we know of Château Lafite or Mouton Rothschild, except that a glass and a half of the former had once compelled my second cousin to untimely slumber at dessert?--and when on a foggy morning we drove away from home, the dank air was heavy with the prognostications that we should return as bottle-nosed dipsomaniacs, and the last thing that caught our eye as we turned the final corner of the avenue was the flutter of a piece of blue ribbon.