They were in the last meadow, with the stream before them. A line of struggling heads in the swollen and milky current showed the hounds' opinion of Reynard's course. The sportsmen galloped off towards the nearest bridge. Bracebridge looked back at Lancelot, who had been keeping by his side in sulky rivalry, following him successfully through all manner of desperate places, and more and more angry with himself and the guiltless colonel, because he only followed, while the colonel's quicker and unembarrassed wit, which lived wholly in the present moment, saw long before Lancelot, 'how to cut out his work,' in every field. 'I shan't go round,' quietly observed the colonel. 'Do you fancy I shall?' growled Lancelot, who took for granted--poor thin-skinned soul! that the words were meant as a hit at himself. 'You're a brace of geese,' politely observed the old squire; 'and you'll find it out in rheumatic fever. There--"one fool makes many!" You'll kill Smith before you're done, colonel!' and the old man wheeled away up the meadow, as Bracebridge shouted after him,-- 'Oh, he'll make a fine rider--in time!' 'In time!' Lancelot could have knocked the unsuspecting colonel down for the word. It just expressed the contrast, which had fretted him ever since he began to hunt with the Whitford Priors hounds. The colonel's long practice and consummate skill in all he took in hand,--his experience of all society, from the prairie Indian to Crockford's, from the prize-ring to the continental courts,--his varied and ready store of information and anecdote,-- the harmony and completeness of the man,--his consistency with his own small ideal, and his consequent apparent superiority everywhere and in everything to the huge awkward Titan-cub, who, though immeasurably beyond Bracebridge in intellect and heart, was still in a state of convulsive dyspepsia, 'swallowing formulae,' and daily well-nigh choked; diseased throughout with that morbid self- consciousness and lust of praise, for which God prepares, with His elect, a bitter cure. Alas! poor Lancelot! an unlicked bear, 'with all his sorrows before him!'-- 'Come along,' quoth Bracebridge, between snatches of a tune, his coolness maddening Lancelot. 'Old Lavington will find us dry clothes, a bottle of port, and a brace of charming daughters, at the Priory. In with you, little Mustang of the prairie! Neck or nothing!'--