"When the tempest is howling his horn you may hear, And the bay of his hounds in their headlong career; For Arscott of Tetcott loves hunting so well, That he breaks for the pastime from heaven--or hell." [Illustration: Fox-hunt, from Hall Chimney-piece, Lew Trenchard.] CHAPTER XIV. THE COUNTY TOWN. [Illustration] Does the reader know one of the most fascinating books of a most fascinating of our old writers, _Belford Regis_, by Miss Mary Russell Mitford? If not, and he or she desires to be carried back on the broad, sweeping, somewhat sad-coloured wings of fancy to the past, to a time before railways, then let _Belford Regis_ be procured, and read, and smiled, and perhaps a little sighed over. As in _Our Village_ the authoress sketched the country, so in _Belford Regis_ did she sketch the little county town at the beginning of the present century. [Illustration: South Gate Launceston] "About three miles to the north of our village stands the good town of Belford Regis. The approach to it, straight as a dart, runs along a wide and populous turnpike road, all alive with carts and coaches, waggons and phaetons, horse-people and foot-people, sweeping rapidly or creeping lazily up and down the gentle undulations with which the surface of the country is varied; and the borders, checkered by patches of common, rich with hedgerow timber, and sprinkled with cottages, and, I grieve to say, with that cottage pest, the beer-house,--and here and there enlivened by dwellings of more pretension and gentility,--become more thickly inhabited as we draw nearer the metropolis of the county, to say nothing of the three cottages all in a row, with two small houses attached, which a board affixed to one of them informs the passer-by is Two-mile Cross; or of these opposite neighbours, the wheelwrights and the blacksmiths, about half a mile further; or the little farm close by the pound; or the series of buildings called the Long Row, terminating at the end next the road with an old-fashioned and most picturesque public-house, with painted roofs, and benches at the door and round the large elm before it--benches which are generally filled by thirsty wayfarers and waggoners watering their horses, and partaking of a more generous liquor themselves. [Illustration: Cottages at Woking: Cottages at the entrance to a Town.]