I suppose hardly one "hunting" woman out of every hundred who go out, ever know how many couple of hounds there are out, or think of counting them while the Master sits outside the covert blowing them to him. Yet this is interesting in itself, and if you know the hounds personally all the more so, as you watch them come tumbling through the fence by ones and twos and go smiling up to their huntsman's side, with a satisfied expression as if they were saying "here I am anyhow." [Illustration: _ELIZABETH, COUNTESS OF WILTON, ON WILLOUGHBY._] Hunting in the provinces has that great advantage over the shires, that you have fewer people out, and consequently you really can take an interest in the hound work and watch what they are doing, and when they run you can keep your eye on them all through, and ride to them, whereas in a fashionable country you get cramped up at a corner of a covert with three or four hundred people hemming you in, behind a narrow gateway may be, hardly wide enough for one horse to get through at a time. Your horse probably gets frightened in the thick of the fray, and tries to go backwards instead of forwards, the man's horse in front of you has his ears back and a ribbon in his tail, while those behind keep cramming on with cries of "_Get_ on, _do_, or else let _me_ come," so by the time you have sniggled yourself through this turmoil, hounds have slipped away and are out of sight. You may then ride for all you are worth, but you probably will never see the _hounds_ again until they kill, or at any rate check. So you must e'en be content with galloping in the wake of somebody else's back, and trust to luck that he is going the right way, but it is dull work compared to picking your own places and using your own head to get to hounds the shortest way.