A FORTNIGHT’S frost tempted me to leave my comfortable quarters at the Haycock, and the delights of Miss Lushington’s society, for the metropolis. Somehow hunting men never _do_ keep away from London in the frost, and I had an excellent excuse in wanting the best advice about my arm. “The fracture had united very satisfactorily.” said the great authority before whom I stripped, paying me at the same time an agreeable compliment on my vigorous state of health, and the development of my muscular system. By the time I had visited the different theatres, and read all the back numbers of my favourite magazines, at “The Hat and Umbrella,” I was as sound again as ever I had been in my life. Nor did I forget, when once more frequenting my comfortable club, to cross-examine Quizby at great length on the subject which was still uppermost in my thoughts. His answers only made me the more anxious to see Miss Merlin: and I never greeted a thaw with greater delight than that which set in, just as I was beginning to get tired of London, and summoned me back to Soakington once more. At the railway station it was obvious that the hunting community, like those migratory birds which periodically leave the frozen regions of the north for warmer climes, was on the wing. Umbrellas and sticks, strapped together in bundles, discovered the white crook of the hunting-whip between their handles; there was a great demand at the bookstall for the _Sporting Magazine_ and the _Field_ newspaper; whilst half the hats hung up in the first-class carriage betrayed, by a little ring of wire just under the brim, that it was their natural destiny to be crushed in bullfinches, knocked off by branches, possibly flattened and crumpled up by the projection of their enthusiastic wearers head-foremost to the earth. Arrived at Soakington, the first person I met was Miss Merlin’s dapper groom. These domestics come out in a thaw, as we see flies begin to swarm the first sunny day in spring. “The country,” he said, in answer to my inquiries, “would ride perfectly well by to-morrow. Indeed, the frost was pretty nigh out of the ground now. His lady? Oh she was quite well, he believed; leastways he might say as he knowed she was, for he’d been over for orders to-day—hadn’t been back an hour. Where? Oh! at the Castle, to be sure, where she’d a-been stopping now a goodish spell. Would she be out to-morrow? Why, in course she would, if she were alive. Did I know that the hounds were to meet at the Haycock? A-purpose to draw Soakington Gorse—that’s the new gorse as my lord made down by Willow Waterless. _Sure_ of a run to-morrow, if you could be sure of anything on this mortal earth!”