“What’s the use of a view? If a man believes his hounds (and if he don’t, he’d better hang ’em and retire himself into private life as a market-gardener), he knows their game is before them, when he hears them throw their tongues, just as certainly as if he’d viewed it fifty times. And, ten to one, long before you see the fox, the fox sees you, and he’s headed back again. I wish I’d a pound for every good run I’ve seen spoilt in that way. No, no! I never want to clap eyes on him till I’ve got him in my hand. I know all about him, then; and so do the hounds. Will you have any more wine, Softly? or shall we join the ladies?” Half a glass of rich brown sherry, than which nothing sobers a man more rapidly, or settles his stomach more comfortably after an over-dose of claret: a stretch of the legs, an arrangement of the neckcloth, and I felt myself ready to confront Jane and Rebecca once more, perhaps with a somewhat keener sense of their merits than I had entertained before dinner. On entering the drawing-room, a dead silence prevailed between the two; I concluded therefore that the topic which they seemed thus suddenly to have dropped must have been one that would not bear _ventilation_ (to use the Parliamentary slang of the present day) before the gentlemen. Perhaps, indeed, it may have referred to the general character of their visitor. I would have given something to know whether they thought me most knave or fool. A well-timed observation from their father put me at last _au fait_ as to the identity of each lady; and when papa said, “Rebecca, won’t you give us some music?” and the one next whom I did not chance to have taken my seat replied, “Very well, papa. What will you have?” it became evident to me that, having devoted myself before, and at dinner, to the elder lady, it was now the younger sister’s turn to have her share of my attentions. Rebecca played skilfully, and accompanied herself, in a small voice, with a tolerably correct attention to time; chiefly delighting, I observed, in simple ballads of a touching and pathetic tendency, such as “Annie,” “Willie, we have missed you,” and a very tearful song about a person of the name of “Margaret.” Pending these melodies, Jane, whom I now discovered to be a lady of a certain force of character and an inquiring turn of mind, “put me through my facings,” if I may use the expression, on a variety of subjects, concerning most of which it has since occurred to me I must have betrayed remarkable ignorance. When you have been out in the cold all day, then enjoyed a good dinner, and a good deal of it, washed down by copious libations of excellent wine, in a warm room, I believe, if you are blessed with a healthy constitution, drowsiness is the inevitable result. Then, suppose yourself placed in a very comfortable arm-chair, opposite a blazing fire, with the hum of quiet voices and the tones of a pianoforte falling soothingly on your ear, and you can exactly imagine my position.