_Leicestershire,
October._
“Bye baby bunting--papa’s gone a-hunting!” But I am letting the cat,
or rather the fox out of the bag.
You know we’re staying with friends at Kibworth. A carriage met us at
the station and brought us to Carlton Curlieu Hall, a fascinating old
house, part of it built in the fifteenth century and part Elizabethan,
with a garden, great trees, and a little pond. Near by are the stables
with nine hunters, and farther away is an old church with its
vicarage, and the village--a few low houses of red brick, some with
thatched roofs.
I had the bed-room Oliver Cromwell slept in the night before the
battle of Naseby. Most of these old houses have a ghost, but Oliver,
I’m sorry to say, didn’t appear.
We are having a ripping time. The Honorable Violet somebody or other
is here, among others. She is lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and a very
charming person. But I don’t know nearly so many Lords and Dukes and
things as you do. I used to detest such people, being an American,
but I find I have changed my mind. What few I have seen have been
perfectly delightful.
Well, the meet yesterday was just like some hunting-pictures we have
at home, with maybe two hundred people, the women and children mostly
on ponies, or driving two-wheeled carts. Then came the ride to cover,
and the drawing. The field was made up of all classes, statesmen,
parsons, peers, and farmers,--all the way from the Duchess of
Hamilton, homely in a brown habit and riding as hard as a man, to a
horse-dealer.
It was quite windy, and most of them said to each other as they
passed, “Good morning. It’s a beastly windy day!”
The hounds rushed in and out of the covers in the hope of finding a
fox, and the huntsmen hallooed and blew their horns. There wasn’t any
fox in the first cover, but at last one was discovered in the open,
and so the pack went scurrying, the huntsmen after them, and the
whips. To my surprise, instead of going straight over a hedge into the
next field, most of the men went galloping off toward a gate. I
didn’t know before that it was bad form to jump unnecessarily. Quite
different in America.
Helter-skelter through the back yards and gardens of the little
cottages we rode, scattering chickens and pigs and children right and
left, while the village people stood in their doorways and watched the
hunters stream past.
Then there was a check--the fox had hidden in one of the barnyards,
and the huntsmen, hounds, and all the small boys searched for him,
while everybody else stood round or walked about in the square in
front of the Bull Head Inn. Soon there was a halloo--the fox had been
found hiding in a hay mow. He was driven out, “broken up” and the
carcass given to the dogs, who yelped and barked and fought for the
pieces. The brush was given to me.
Now you can’t say I haven’t written you a long letter, dear old A.
D.,--but it was such a wonderful day that I just had to tell you all
about it.
* * * * *