On a hunting-day, if the hounds are anywhere within reach, Joe may be seen at the smithy with an array of different-sized shoes ready laid out beside him, and as he works on some job in the shop he keeps one eye down the road, on the look-out for some unfortunate sportsman who has had the misfortune to get a shoe off. It is his pride that he can tack a shoe on quicker than any man in the country. "Yer see," he says, "I 'as 'em all ready by me, and when I sees the gent a-coming, I 'ain't got no cause to look 'ere and there and heverywhere for the stuff I wants. There they are, and it's on and away in a jiff." All the time he is asking the sportsman about the day: "What sort of a run? where he left the hounds? and where they was a-going to draw next?" And then, having received his due, he will step outside, take a look which way the wind is, and direct the thrown-out fox-hunter as to his most likely course in order to hit off the hounds again. Odd to say, he is seldom wrong (unless, indeed, they have had a quick find, and gone away before the sportsman arrives at the indicated spot); for long experience has taught Joe all the short cuts in the country, together with which he combines an innate knowledge of the run of a fox. Old Tom Wilding the Huntsman, and Sir John Lappington the Master, are, in his opinion, the two greatest men in England. For, as he puts it, "Without them two where would be the 'ounds? and without the 'ounds where would my bloomin' business go to?" Then perhaps someone will point out that he might make a better thing out of cow-doctoring; but his reply will be: "Oh, that's your opinion, is it? well; it ain't mine. Look'ee 'ere--any fool, 'cept a vetery, who's got a ounce of sense, can do a cow; but mark yer, it takes a goodish time to make a man a blacksmith; and though I say it as perhaps shouldn't, there ain't a man as I gives in to in the matter of shoeing an 'oss, no matter where he comes from. No, as long as I can use my arm" (and he bares a limb that would not disgrace a statue of Hercules), "and there's any wind in the old bellows, I sticks to t' smithy. Blacksmith I was bred, and so I'll die; and all I wants is, when our ould parson 'as finished the reading over my grave, to 'ave a plain bit of a 'eadstone put up, with simple 'Joe Billings, the Lappington Blacksmith,' wrote on it;" and then Joe will turn to and whistle a lively air, just to get the idea of his demise out of his head, and the bystanders will say among themselves that at present they can't spare old Joe, who has for five-and-twenty years made the sparks fly and rung out the anvil chorus in the smithy at Lappington. THE RUNNER.