They, the less active part above alluded to, know every high-road and bye-road; they consult the wind, and calculate that a fox won’t run with his nose against it; they remember this stream and this bog, and avoid them; they are often at the top of eminences, and only descend when they see which way the dogs are going; they take short cuts, and lay themselves out for narrow lanes; they dislike galloping, and eschew leaping; and yet, when a hard-riding man is bringing up his two hundred guinea hunter, a minute or two late for the finish, covered with foam, trembling with his exertion, not a breath left in him—he’ll probably find one of these steady fellows there before him, mounted on a broken-down screw, but as cool and as fresh as when he was brought out of the stable; and what is, perhaps, still more amazing, at the end of the day, when the hunt is canvassed after dinner, our dashing friend, who is in great doubt whether his thoroughbred steeplechaser will ever recover his day’s work, and who has been personally administering warm mashes and bandages before he would venture to take his own boots off, finds he does not know half as much about the hunt, or can tell half as correctly where the game went, as our quiet-going friend, whose hack will probably go out on the following morning under the car, with the mistress and children. Such a one was Parson Armstrong; and when Lord Ballindine and most of the others went away after the hounds, he coolly turned round in a different direction, crept through a broken wall into a peasant’s garden, and over a dunghill, by the cabin door into a road, and then trotted along as demurely and leisurely as though he were going to bury an old woman in the next parish. Frank was, generally speaking, as good-natured a man as is often met, but even he got excited and irritable when hunting his own pack. All masters of hounds do. Some one was always too forward, another too near the dogs, a third interfering with the servants, and a fourth making too much noise. “Confound it, Peter,” he said, when they had gone over a field or two, and the dogs missed the scent for a moment, “I thought at any rate you knew better than to cross the dogs that way.” “Who crossed the dogs?” said the other—“what nonsense you’re talking: why I wasn’t out of the potato-field till they were nearly all at the next wall.” “Well, it may be nonsense,” continued Frank; “but when I see a man riding right through the hounds, and they hunting, I call that crossing them.” “Hoicks! tally”—hollowed some one—“there’s Graceful has it again—well done, Granger! Faith, Frank, that’s a good dog! if he’s not first, he’s always second.” “Now, gentlemen, steady, for heaven’s sake. Do let the dogs settle to their work before you’re a-top of them. Upon my soul, Nicholas Brown, it’s ridiculous to see you!” “It’d be a good thing if he were half as much in a hurry to get to heaven,” said Bingham Blake.