The meeting-place was crowded with horsemen and carriages, country
squires and their sons, gentlemen-farmers on sleek hunters, and humbler
tenant-farmers on their stiff cobs, butchers and innkeepers, all eager
for the chase. All was life, gaiety excitement, noise; the hounds,
giving forth occasional howls and snappish yelpings, expressive of an
impatience that was almost beyond endurance; the huntsman cracking his
whip, and reproving his charges in language more forcible than polite;
the spirited horses pawing the ground; the gentlemen exchanging the
compliments of the season with the ladies who had come up to see the
hounds throw off.
At last the important moment arrived, the horn sounded, the hounds
broke away with a rush, and the business of the day had begun.
Again the rector's horse was seized with sudden obstinacy, and again
the rector found it as much as he could do to manage him. An inferior
horseman would have been thrown in that sharp and short struggle
between horse and rider; but Lionel's firm hand triumphed over the
animal's temper for the time at least; and presently he was hurrying
onward at a stretching gallop, which speedily carried him beyond the
ruck of riders.
As he skimmed like a bird over the low flat meadows, Lionel began to
think that the horse was an acquisition, in spite of the sudden freaks
of temper which had made him so difficult to manage at starting.
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