“O, bother The Ashes;” returned my mercurial companion. “We shall get there quite soon enough. Besides, the governor never shows till feeding-time; busy about the farm you know, mud-larking as I call it. No! no! if you want to see some fun, I’ll show you a game. We’ll just trot down to Joe Lambswool’s, at the World’s End, about two miles further on, and if you _do_ care for sport, I can promise you a real treat. He’s going to pull down the old barn to-day; hasn’t been touched, I dare say, for two hundred years. Talk of rats! why, it’s swarming with them, as big as pole-cats pretty nigh, and twice as savage. He’s got a _dawg_ as I want to see tried, quite a little ’un, what you would call a toy-_dawg_, you know; but they tell me he’ll tackle to anything alive, and knows how to kill a cat. If I like him I’ll buy him; and we’ll give old Brimstone a treat into the bargain,” added my amiable entertainer, looking back at the bull-terrier, who was toiling behind us, bespattered with mud, his tail lowered, his tongue out, and a villanous expression of sullenness and ferocity stamped on his round massive head. “I should like it excessively,” I replied, with an inward shudder, belying, most uncomfortably, my unqualified expressions of delight, and the Jovial, turning on me a look of astonished approval, made a queer noise through his teeth, that started Crafty Kate incontinently into a canter. “Well! I’m in for it now!” was my mental soliloquy, as we went whirling past the dripping trees and hedges with increasing rapidity. “How could I ever be induced to blunder into such a trap as this? A wet day; a dangerous drive; a pot-house gathering, and an afternoon spent in a tumble-down barn, full of draughts I make no doubt, and by no means water-tight; watching for rats, animals of which I have the greatest horror, and circumventing the same by means of ferrets—creatures if possible more disgusting to me than their prey—all because I hadn’t nerve to say ‘No.’ And not a chance now of seeing Miss Merlin when she comes home from hunting! Softly! this is a day’s penance. You must get through it as you best can!” A rescue, however, when I least expected it, was proposed for me by a kind fortune, to snatch me from the _ratting_ part of my discomforts. The lane down which we were bowling, though of considerable length, was not that proverbial one in which there is no turning. On reaching an angle by a sign-post, the Jovial pulled up, with great animation displayed on his broad white face. “I can hear ’em running in Tangler’s Copse, as plain as can be,” said he, putting up his hand in the air, and cocking his head on one side to listen. Tangler’s Copse, be it observed, was a straggling woodland in the Castle-Cropper country, from which it was always difficult, and generally impossible, to force a fox into the open. “Listen, Softly!” he continued, with increasing excitement; “I’m blessed if that isn’t the horn! See, Kate hears it too.”