"A grey fox with red ears. The best run I ever had. Tried to get in the crotch of a hickory tree at the end. Was so exhausted he couldn't stir a foot when the hounds got him." While they waited at the crossroads before a little country store, where the pack of hounds, lean, cringing, habitually hungry creatures, started from beneath an old field pine on the right, Virginia heard the broken phrases blown on the wind, which carried the joyous notes of the horn over the meadows. The casual cruelty of the words awoke no protest in her mind, because it was a cruelty to which she was accustomed. If the sport had been unknown in Dinwiddie, and she had read of it as the peculiar activity of the inhabitants of the British Islands, she would probably have condemned it as needlessly brutal and degrading. But with that universal faculty of the human mind to adjust its morality to fit its inherited physical habits, she regarded "the rights of the fox" to-day with something of the humorous scorn of sentimental rubbish with which her gentler grandmother had once regarded "the rights of the slave." For centuries the hunt had been one of the cherished customs of Dinwiddians; and though she could not bear to see a fly caught in a web, it would never have occurred to her to question the humanity of any sport in which her ancestors had delighted. In her girlhood the sound of the horn had called to her blood with all the intoxicating associations it awoke in the raw-boned, energetic rider in the plum-coloured coat--but to-day both the horn and the familiar landscape around her had grown strange and unhomelike. For the first time since her birth she and the country were out of harmony. In the midst of the hounds, in the centre of the old field on the right, the huntsman, who was at the same time master and owner of the dogs, brandished a long raw-hide whip, flexible from the handle, which was pleasantly known in Dinwiddie as a "mule-skinner." His face, burned to the colour of ripe wheat, wore a rapt and exalted look, as though the chasing of a small animal to its death had called forth his latent spiritual ardours. Beyond him, like a low, smouldering fire, ran the red and gold of the abandoned field. "Please be careful, Virginia," said Oliver again, as they left the road and cantered in the direction of a clump of pine woods in a hollow beyond a rotting "snake" fence.