This was meant to imply that the kicker was too valuable an animal for a mere hunter, and the Honourable interpreted it accordingly. As he rode alongside, he scanned the bay’s points with the critical eye of a purchaser. A horse never looks so well as when he is trotting beside you on a strip of grass, excited by the presence of hounds. If backed by a good horseman, the veriest brute, under these circumstances, makes the most of his own appearance. Marathon going within himself, playing lightly with his bit, and bringing his hind legs under his girths at every step, was a very different horse from the same Marathon extended and labouring, in a sticky ploughed field. I have already said he possessed many qualities sufficiently taking to the eye. As the Honourable examined him from his muzzle to his hocks, he could not but acknowledge that the horse looked uncommonly like a galloper. “If he can only jump,” thought Crasher, “and get pretty quick over his fences, he ought to be a _rattler_. I suppose I shall have to buy him.” Meanwhile Mr. Sawyer, who, as he remarked of himself, “was not such a fool as he looked,” but on the contrary resembled those “still waters” which the German proverb says “run so deep,” conversed affably with his friend on a number of topics totally unconnected with horseflesh, or the pleasures of the hunting-field. For once in his life, he did not want to get a start, that’s the truth; and as his companion was one of those indolent, easy-going people whose fancy can be led astray without difficulty in any given direction, they were soon deep in a variety of subjects, originating no doubt with Mr. Sawyer, but to which, I am bound to say, he had never devoted much of his time or attention. They touched upon the last misadventure brought under the notice of Sir Cresswell Cresswell—discussed the agricultural prospects of the season, and on this theme it would be difficult to say which was most incapable of giving an opinion—argued on the importance of a movement for taking the duty off cigars, and lastly got involved in the interminable question of what use the Volunteers would be, in the event of an invasion, and whether or not they would be killed to a man, when their conversation was cut short by an obvious bustle and confusion about a mile ahead of them, denoting that a fox had not only been found, but gone away. “Done to a turn!” exclaimed the Honourable, interrupting his own explanation of how he should handle skirmishers if he was a general officer, which, by the way, it was fortunate for the skirmishers he was _not_. “What a bore! We sha’n’t catch them in a week!” he added, turning Boadicea’s head at the fence, and starting her at score through a deep ploughed field. In a few strides he had forgotten skirmishers, and Marathon, and Mr. Sawyer, and everything in the world except that he had lost his start.