CHAPTER I.

T was our first day’s cub-hunting, and things had been going against us from the outset.

To begin with, we had started rather late,—it is noticeable that the minutes between five and six A.M. are fewer and closer together than they are at any other period of the day,—and, when half way to the meet we found that Betty had given way to her sporting proclivities, and had surreptitiously followed us. When it is explained that Betty is a St. Bernard puppy of cart-horse dimensions, whose expression of smiling imbecility only cloaks a will of iron, it will be understood that there was trouble before us. The trouble began at once. Directly she saw she was discovered she ran away, and the next time we saw her she was three fields ahead of us, lumbering cheerfully into covert at the heels of the hounds, pursued by several cows and the curses of the master.

By the time that she had been caught and immured in the bedroom of the nearest cottage, we were covered with confusion and blazing with heat, and while we were precariously scrambling on to our horses’ backs by the help of the pigstye door, we were told by an excited old man that the hounds had found, and were ‘firing away like the divil’ out of the far side of the wood. This happened to be one of those statements that are founded not so much on fact as on a desire to keep things stirring and pleasant, but none the less did it send us at inconvenient speed to the other side of the covert, there to find that the hounds had never left it, and were hunting slowly back towards the side from which we had just come.

Not long after this my second cousin lost her temper, and said she hated cubbing, and wished she was back in Connemara, or anywhere out of the county Cork. This expression of opinion occurred when she was picking herself up out of a potato furrow, into which she and her horse had ingloriously rolled, and it was a good deal embittered by the fact that she had hurt her knee, torn her habit, and broken her hunting crop.

The day ended with this incident, so far, at least, as we were concerned. Betty was released from the captivity that she had not ceased to bewail in quivering, infantine shrieks, and we turned our faces toward home. There is something very humbling in coming in at ten o’clock to a late edition of the family breakfast, with nothing to justify the routing up of the household at five A.M. except a torn habit and a bruised knee; and we said to each other, as we went unostentatiously up the back stairs, that cubbing was not worth the candle by which one had to get up to be in time for it.

We did not know that a few days afterwards we should be hanging out of the window of the train as, at a painfully early hour, it passed a covert in the vicinity, straining jaundiced eyes of jealousy at the distant specks that represented the field and the hounds—specks who were to remain in the county Cork and go out cubbing, instead of faring forth, as we were doing, to take our pleasure in foreign lands.

The letter that we found on the dining-room table, when we came down-stairs on that day that had

been sacrificed to Betty, was responsible for this unexpected change of circumstances. It said majestically, ‘You are to go to the vineyards of the Médoc, and must start at once in order to be in time for the vintage;’ and in spite of a grand and complete ignorance of Médoc, its vintages, and wines in general, we accepted the position with calm, even with satisfaction.

The gibes of our friends were many and untiring, and were the harder to bear that we felt a secret scepticism as to our fitness for this large and yet delicate mission,—what did we know of Château Lafite or Mouton Rothschild, except that a glass and a half of the former had once compelled my second cousin to untimely slumber at dessert?—and when on a foggy morning we drove away from home, the dank air was heavy with the prognostications that we should return as bottle-nosed dipsomaniacs, and the last thing that caught our eye as we turned the final corner of the avenue was the flutter of a piece of blue ribbon.

We had a singularly detestable journey to London, or perhaps it was that a summer spent in country remoteness made the train and its loathsome sister, the steamboat, more intolerable than usual. As far as Dublin we were comparatively confident, though the trees at the station were rustling a little in the wind, and the window-frames shook ominously in dismal accompaniment to the lamentations of the emigrants who crowded the platforms, waiting for the down train to Cork. There are happily few things in the world that are as bad as they are expected to be, but a bad crossing is worse than the combined efforts of imagination and remembrance can make it. This, at least, is the opinion of my second cousin, who ought by this time to have some knowledge of a subject to which, according to her own reckoning of the time occupied in each crossing, she has given some fifty of the best years of her life. The trees and the window-frames had not overstated the case, and we had the gloomy satisfaction of hearing the stewardess remark, as we neared Holyhead, that it had been a rough passage. We could have told her so ourselves, but still it was gratifying to have the thing placed on an official basis.

In the pale morning, as we endured that last long hour before Euston is reached, we read in headachy snatches a pamphlet that we had been lent about the wines of the Médoc, and our souls sank at the prospect of expounding the laws of fermentation to readers who would be as oppressively bored by it as we ourselves. But our first day in London routed this hobgoblin: we were to enjoy ourselves; we were to taste claret if we wished, or talk bad French to the makers of it if it amused us; but to improve other people’s minds by figures and able disquisitions on viticulture and the treatment of the phylloxera was not, we heard with thanksgiving, to be our mission.

The three days before our start were spent in the manner customary in such cases; that is to say, we moved incessantly and at an ever-quickening pace between the Strand, the Army and Navy Stores, and High Street, Kensington, laden with small parcels,

footsore from the unaccustomed flagstones, and care-worn from the effort to utilise the Underground return tickets that an ideally perfect programme had induced us to take in the morning. In addition to these usual cares, another more poignant anxiety fell to our lot. We were lent a Kodak,—for the benefit of the unlearned it may be mentioned that the Kodak is a photographic camera of the kind that is to the ordinary species as a compressed meat lozenge to a round of beef,—and as neither of us knew anything about it, it became necessary to learn its mechanism in a fevered ten minutes, or to leave it behind. Ambition fired us to the attempt, and having adjourned with the Kodak and an instructor to the severely simple scenery of the gardens on the Thames Embankment, we received there our first and only lesson. What its results were will never be known to the public; a group of intoxicated ghosts lolling on a bench in the depths of a spotted fog can be of little interest to any one except the artists, and even to their indulgent eyes its charm is of a somewhat morbid character.

After these agitations, the corner seats of a railway carriage at Victoria had a restful luxury about them that was almost stagnation. The consciousness of two portmanteaus registered to Bordeaux almost made up for the cumbrous row of hand packages that squatted in the netting; and the half-hour of waiting for the train to start was a period of soothing inaction scarcely ruffled by the slow filling of the carriage to its limit of five on each side, and merely moved to a languid enjoyment by the inexorable determination of the latest comers, a bride and bridegroom, to sit next to each other irrespective of all previous arrangements of old ladies and their baskets. They had about them the well-known power of making their innocent and well-meaning fellow-creatures feel in the way and in the wrong, and the eyes of the carriage sought the windows or the ceiling as if by word of command when, after the settling down of glowingly new bags and rugs was completed, the latest comers leaned back and gazed into each other’s faces with an unaffected ecstasy, the fact that both wore gold-rimmed spectacles imparting a sort of serious lustre to their mutual regard. The gaze seemed to us to last most of the way to Dover, except at those moments when a glance or two was given to their fellow-passengers, a glance of almost compassionate wonder that people so uninteresting and so superfluous should be alive. It gave us an instant of pleasure when some time afterwards on board the boat we saw that the bride’s fringe was blown into dejected wisps, and that her groom’s nose was blue and his face pinched.

Before we reached Dover an example was vouchsafed to us in further proof, if such were needed, of the difficulty of saying good-bye agreeably at the window of a railway carriage. In this case the victims of the custom stood on the platform, smiling spasmodically at the other victim in the carriage, and saying at intervals, ‘Well, you’ll write, won’t you?’ ‘So good of you to come and see me off.’ ‘Well, mind you write!’ ‘Oh yes, dear, and be sure you give my love to Mary and Aunt Williams.’ Then they all smiled brightly and nodded their heads, and the traveller, with her chin upon the window-sill, beamed galvanically down upon her friends, and in her turn adjured them not to forget to write. As the train moved off at last, the farewells thickened to a climax, and we were privileged to observe how, when the final delicate flutter of the hand had been given, the smile disappeared from the face of the traveller, and she thankfully yielded herself to the deferred enjoyment of her newspaper.

Of the further journey to Paris there is happily little to record. ‘Das höchste Glück hat reine Lieder,’ and the most satisfactory travelling is that which lends itself least to description. The Calais boat made its journey in the most brilliant of sunshine and the most refreshing of breezes, trampling its way along the water at a pace that made the tall merchantmen look more old-world and stately than usual as they moved serenely down the Channel. The male part of the passengers walked the deck as if their lives depended on it, after the custom of men; the ladies sat in sheltered places and tried to keep their hair tidy; and all alike exhibited the hypnotic consciousness of the presence of a sketch-book, that makes the most cautious sketcher the object of instant remark and suspicion.

We sat that night in the warm, airless courtyard of a Paris hotel; tall dusty shrubs in pots hung their lank leaves limply over our heads; waiters flitted like bats to and fro between the kitchen on one side and the salle-à-manger on the other. A French family, consisting of a papa, a mamma, a beautifully behaved daughter with her hair in a queue, a humorous old friend of a godfatherly type, and a little boy with tasselled boots, partook of various liquids at a table near enough to us to permit of our hearing their effortless, endless babble, and also to observe with ever-growing hatred the self-conscious gambols of the little boy. Later on, they adjourned to the salon, and the daughter performed a selection of music. She began with a confident rendering of ‘La Prière d’une Vierge’ one of those pieces which once was the strength and glory of every budding pianiste, but now in its old age is only heard limping and faltering over the greasy keys of hotel pianos; and she finished with an operatic gallop in which the treble fled about in lonely frenzy, and the bass retired on to the lowest octave of the piano and there had a fit of St. Vitus’s dance. The little boy pirouetted about the room, the papa, mamma, and godfather clapped their hands and laughed indulgently, and a good many of the windows that gave on to the courtyard were suddenly and violently shut.

We went to bed after that; that is to say, we retired into a good-sized opera-box, with windows opening on to lamps and palms, and a general interior effect of red curtains and mirrors. It is one of the strangest features of French hotels that dressing-tables are not included in any suite of bedroom furniture; there are looking-glasses by the score, there are handsome marble slabs bearing ornate clocks that do not go, there are gorgeous armoires à glace, but never a good, commonplace, useful dressing-table. French people seem to do without them in the same simple, uncomplaining way that they do without baths.

We cannot pretend to say we slept well in our opera-box. Everything in the hotel seemed to stay up

all night, including a small but devoted party of fleas; and the atmosphere, even when diluted with as much courtyard air as the windows would let in, was heavy and hot. We came down next morning feeling unrefreshed, and not at all disposed to bestow of our substance on the street musician who, since eight o’clock, had been playing national airs on an accordion in the courtyard. Having seen us pass by on our way to breakfast, he immediately played ‘God save the Queen,’ gliding subsequently into the ‘Marseillaise’ as a kind of corrective, and then finding that we still drank our coffee unmoved, he broke into a defiant polka, which, did he but know it, has ‘sung in our sleeping ear and hummed in our waking head’ in elusive, half-remembered snatches, revenging a thousandfold the callousness of the two Anglaises.

We had not much time to spare after breakfast, as the Bordeaux train by which we were going started at 11.20. A mosquito net was, however, one of the things we had forgotten, and one of the things which we were assured was indispensable, and it was not until we had entered a likely-looking shop that we realised that we did not know the French for mosquito. My second cousin and the shopwoman regarded each other for a few seconds in polite silence, and then the latter said interrogatively,—

‘Madame désire—?’

My second cousin answered diffidently that she desired fine net as a—as a—in short, for a veil against the—the flies that bite.

The shopwoman looked at her with compassion, and offered me a handsome long black lace veil, and with it the assurance that mademoiselle would find it very becoming. At this stage in the negotiation the two purchasers began to laugh with the agonising laughter that has too often overtaken them in shops, and the shopwoman, as is usual in such cases, was obviously convinced that she was being laughed at, and haughtily replaced the lace veil in its box. Having wept profusely and idiotically before her for some moments, we recovered sufficiently to ask for white muslin, and succeeded in buying a suitable piece, with which we slunk out of the shop, resolved that in future death alone should part us from Bellows’ Dictionary.

CHAPTER II.

‘Twenty minutes—half an hour—three-quarters—what mademoiselle pleases!’

This was what the waiter said when we asked him how long it would take to drive to the Gare d’Orléans on the morning that we left Paris. We selected half an hour, and by so doing as nearly as possible missed our train—in fact, when we arrived at the Quai d’Austerlitz the station clock was already at the hour of departure. It was consoling to be told officially that it was five minutes fast, but five minutes does not go far in the maddening routine of French stations, and we were wrecks, mentally and physically, by the time we had wedged ourselves into the crowded carriage, labelled ‘Bordeaux—Bastide,’ that was to be our portion. French railway officials never weary of this little practical joke of keeping the outside clock of the station five minutes fast. If they did it always it would lose its piquancy, but they guard against this by occasional deviations into truth, so that the nerve of the public is effectively shattered, and the station officials never fail of amusement.

Eleven hours in a train is an immeasurable time, especially when the train goes through a country that, after a first hour or so of picturesqueness, lacks absolutely any distinction of colour or outline. Greyish tilled plains stretched away on either side, without a fence, without a boundary, except for the occasional rows of housemaids’ mops and birch-rods that enlivened the horizon. These detachments of poplars are inseparable from French travelling; they haunt the ridges of the plains like the ghosts of worthier trees, with all the dejection befitting those who know that they are only worth a few francs, and can hope for no better transmigration than a kitchen table or a pig’s trough. The country seemed silent and empty after the harvest; we saw very few living things except flocks of sheep, and we meditated with an ever-growing wonder on what might be the moral suasion that kept each of these on its own undefended square of grass. Arguing from the more than demoniacal perverseness of Irish sheep in breaking bounds, it seemed to us that the French must have hit on the supreme expedient of offering no resistance whatever, and thereby destroyed at one blow the essential joy of trespass.

The train progressed in an easy canter, giving us time to observe all wayside objects: we could have counted the big citrouillesHistory of England