“Slow!” retorted Mr. Sawyer indignantly. “Not at all; I was riding the best horse in my stable, and he had to do all he knew to live with them. Fine country, too—wild fox-hunting country—not a soul in the fields; very deep, and a good deal of fencing. I don’t know that I was ever better carried,” he added meditatively, hoping to bring the conversation round to the merits of the grey. But the Honourable Crasher had his story to tell too, and broke in with unusual vehemence: “_Ours_ was about the quickest thing I ever rode to. Found in Faxton Corner; fox never hung a second, and the hounds ran him over those large grass-fields as if they were tied to him, all down by——Dear me, I forget the names of the places, and I never _can_ describe a run; but if you don’t know the country, it don’t signify. In short, they ran him all about, you know, over a capital line, and turned him up in the open, at the end of seven-and-twenty minutes, without a check, and very straight, you know, and all that; satisfactory to everybody, and not at all bad fun, and so on.” The Honourable C. was rapidly collapsing, running down like the last notes of a musical box. Ere he arrived at this very explicit conclusion, he had become perfectly torpid again. Finding his neighbour would not listen to _his_ story, Mr. Sawyer thought he might as well get what he could in the way of information, and began accordingly to propound a series of questions, only interrupted by the occasional apparition, at the window, of a broad chest and ruddy bearded face belonging to the guard, who, seeing the gentlemen still smoking, vanished again incontinently. The examination proceeded much as follows, the catechumen, though waking up at intervals, becoming more and more comatose. Mr. Sawyer: “It is very stiff, isn’t it, that Pytchley country? Large fences that won’t bear liberties being taken with them?” The Honourable Crasher: “Yeas, I should say, it wanted a hunter to get over it.” Mr. S.: “Do you consider it as difficult to cross as the Quorn?” The Hon. C.: “Yeas—no—that’s to say, I ride the same horses in both; I don’t know that there’s much difference.” “Whom do your consider your best men now, in your field?” “Oh! there are lots of fellows who can ride, _if they get a start_. It’s impossible to say; there’s a good deal in luck, and a good deal in horses.” [N.B. This is hardly a sincere speech of the Hon. C.’s. He does _not_ think either luck or horseflesh constitutes a _customer_, and has not the slightest doubt in his own mind as to whom he considers about the best performer in that or any other country; only modesty forbids him to name the individual.] Mr. S., a little dissatisfied: “I suppose the Leicestershire men are splendidly mounted?” Hon. C.: “No; I should say not. I never remember seeing so few good horses. I shouldn’t know where to get a hunter if I wanted one!”