The Scratch Pack

"It was thinkin' of kapin' the payce mid us, me Dada 'd say," murmured little Andy. "What they kills, Mr. Darby can pay for aisy. They're apt to catch bins, an' they hungered. I...

Christmas Day had interfered with stopping. A fox got to ground in covert and Darby decided to go home, glad of the chance, for hounds had had a hard day on Christmas Eve, and B...

When it was decided that he had not gone three diamonds over Basil's three clubs, because when pressed he offered to show that of diamonds he had but one, the game proceeded, so...

"Be the time someone is bit getting away the fox, the other one'll be at Durra," he whispered. "And why should we lose a hunt acclimatizing this lot to do right, when, with the...

Darby was familiar with matches. He wrote out that Mr. D. Rooney's That's the Boy, five years, by Barcol Lise, would be matched against Mr. J. Rourke's--here he lifted his pen.

Anyone whom he failed to dominate he disagreed with; and as Mat the old groom used to remark: "The Masther begridged even if the fox to go the way he'd like himself."

"The sorra a thing wrong with him but a clip on the head, Miss," said Mr. Dunne. "Let ye not be frightened. He'll be all right when he sees clear again, an' the sthars is in."

"Save an' bless us, Miss Gheena, but Hartigan is afther bein' below in the yard an' all the horses soult! When he clapped his eyes on them, 'How much,' says he, 'for we have too...

The clergyman arrived primed with war news and plans. In his opinion the Allies had only just to go there and move up there, and pinch Germany in one place and nip her in anothe...

"If it was a gag on his hocks it would do her," gulped Darby, when he had recovered a little and emerged from the stable he had fled into. "He wears his curb behind, Mrs. Weston...

"We had to come home from the meet," said Darby, having duly listened without comment. "Too wild to keep hounds out and no one there but ourselves.--I'm not listening! But I was...

"There is really no use trying if it makes you make noises like that," said Matilda Freyne kindly. "Is there, Dearest? Though it's probably all nerves and really doesn't hurt a...

He stopped quite suddenly. If Gheena looked on Basil Stafford as a slacker and perhaps worse, she would never get to care for him, and hope is so strong a thing that there was a...

Darby looked down at his stick, stifling a quiet sigh. Lancelot Freyne was duly taken home next day, his expression one of puffy peevishness. Even the wielding of the sword in F...

They went to church presently, where the cotton-wool texts looked brave, if a little tired, and the usual smell of roast stove and drying cushions pervaded the airless atmospher...

"Every nice day if we hunt, then, Andy," said Gheena. "And--and you wouldn't like to see all the foxes dead and none to go after when the poor huntsmen come back from the war."

"Before I came here I wanted it as I shall never want it again," said Stafford slowly. "An old debt suddenly cropping up, a dying mother with her only chance an operation and a...

But running down wind scent failed again. Slowly, earnestly, hounds puzzled it out, now one flinging forward with a long yowl, then dropping into silence almost angrily. Slowly...

Gheena immediately thought of something brilliant. The neglected gardens of the Dower House stretched in melancholy confusion down to the water's edge. Box trees endeavoured to...

A variety of muffled figures now issued from the bushes. Gheena entirely covered by art-muslin curtains, Stafford with a butterfly net over his head and the handle wagging behin...

"If there even appeared to be the faintest reason for his not going into something," said Gheena severely. Then she put her hand on the collar of the nondescript cur named Crabb...

"Wild as hawks they was," confided old Barty, who looked hot. "Here, there and elsewhere, an' ready to be at the clouds if they'd run along the bog for them."

"Next year," said Darby. Through the dreariness of futurity came a glow bright as that of the unexpected gallop. He had come to the moment when he had to chain sorrow, lest it s...