Jenny looked charming in repose. She was in a delightful green habit; she wore a plumy kind of hat; she rode an almost perfect little mare belonging to Lord Talgarth, and her big blue, steady eyes roved slowly round her as she went, seeing nothing. It was, in fact, the almost perfect little mare who first gave warning of the approach to the sportsmen, by starting violently all over at the sound of a shot, fired about half a mile away. Jenny steadied her, pulled her up, and watched between the cocked and twitching ears. Below her, converging slowly upwards, away from herself, moved a line of dots, each precisely like its neighbor in color (Lord Talgarth was very particular, indeed, about the uniform of his beaters), and by each moved a red spot, which Jenny understood to be a flag. The point towards which they were directed culminated in a low, rounded hill, and beneath the crown of this, in a half circle, were visible a series of low defenses, like fortifications, to command the face of the slope and the dips on either side. This was always the last beat--in this moor--before lunch; and lunch itself, she knew, would be waiting on the other side of the hill. Occasionally as she watched, she saw a slight movement behind this or that butt--no more--and the only evidence of human beings, beside the beaters, lay in the faint wreath of all but invisible smoke that followed the reports, coming now quicker and quicker, as the grouse took alarm. Once with a noise like a badly ignited rocket, there burst over the curve before her a flying brown thing, that, screaming with terrified exultation, whirred within twenty yards of her head and vanished into silence. (One cocked ear of the mare bent back to see if the rocket were returning or not.) Jenny's meditations became more philosophical than ever as she looked. She found herself wondering how much free choice the grouse--if they were capable themselves of philosophizing--would imagine themselves to possess in the face of this noisy but insidious death. She reminded herself that every shred of instinct and experience that each furious little head contained bade the owner of it to fly as fast and straight as possible, in squawking company with as many friends as possible, away from those horrible personages in green and silver with the agitating red flags, and up that quiet slope which, at the worst, only emitted sudden noises. A reflective grouse would perhaps (and two out of three did) consider that he could fly faster and be sooner hidden from the green men with red flags, if he slid crosswise down the valleys on either side. But--Jenny observed--that was already calculated by these human enemies, and butts (like angels' swords) commanded even these approaches too.