"Here I am, old boy, gazing hungrily across to you, while Tindar rolls between. Come and pay me a flying visit, I adjure you. You shall sleep each night on your own bank of the river if your scrupulous conscience won't let you quit your own state without leave, but take pity on an unfortunate chum doomed to go crusading--castle-destroying, that is--in the hot weather. I promised you one of Vixen's pups--as nice little beggars all of them as you could wish to behold--and who am I to presume to choose for you? I am entertaining so many dogs nowadays that I expect to be eaten out of house and home, so it's serious, you see. Happy thought--start a pack of hounds! That's another reason why you should come. I can't offer to show you at the present season 'the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent. of its danger,' but at least we can draw up an uncommon fine constitution for the hunt. I know you'll object that the conjunction of two such stars of chivalry as yourself and yours truly in the same firmament has hitherto boded war, red war, but was that our fault? Surely it was merely a proof of our innate foreknowledge of events that we managed to be in each other's neighbourhood just when united action was needed. Besides, there's no combustible material in these parts. That's waiting for the week after next, when the Agpur frontier business comes up for settlement, and I have to be back in the Adamkot direction. Come and see me, Hal, if it's only for a talk and a smoke. Upon my word, I am des-s-s-perately lonely! Bring a tail as long as MacTavish's if you like, and we'll indoctrinate them with the science of fox-hunting. Your old Hubshee would be something of a Jorrocks figure if we stuck him into a hunt uniform, I'll be bound,--Yours, ROBERT. "_P.S._--Admire my self-restraint in keeping back so far the all-important information that mine will of course be a _Bobbery_ pack."