* * * * *

[Illustration:  “ANOTHER BLOW FOR THE COALITION.”

Sombre Reveller. “IS THIS PADDINGTON?”

Porter. “PADDINGTON?  NO!  IT’S MERSTHAM.  WHY, YOU AIN’T EVEN ON THE RIGHT RAILWAY.  THIS IS SOUTH-EASTERN AND CHATHAM.”

Reveller. “THERE Y’ARE, Y’SEE.  THAT’S WHAT COMES OF GOV’MENT CONTROL OF RAILWAYS.”]

* * * * *

HOUND-FOXES.

It was really Isabel’s idea.  But it must be admitted that the Foxes took it up with remarkable promptitude.  How it reached them is uncertain, but maybe the little bird that nests outside her nursery window knows more than we do.

The idea owed its inception to my attempt at explaining the pink-coated horsemen depicted on an old Christmas card.  I did my best, right up to and including the “worry,” in which Isabel joined with enthusiasm.  Then she went to bed.

But not to sleep.  As I passed by the open door I heard a small excited voice expounding to a lymphatic dolly the whole mystery of fox-hunting:—­

“And there was a wood, and there was a smell.  And all the peoploos on ’normous huge high horses.  And nen all the hound-foxes runned after the smell and eated it all up.”

A fortnight later, taking a short cut through the Squire’s coverts, I sat down to enjoy the glory of woodland springtime.  “There was a wood and there was a smell.”  There certainly was; in fact I was all but sitting upon an earth.

All this is credible enough.  Now I hope you will believe the rest of the story.

A dirty sheet of paper lay near Reynard’s front doorstep.  Idly curious, I picked it up.  Strange paper, a form of print that I had never seen before; marked too with dirty pads.

It was a newspaper of sorts.  Prominent notices adjured the reader to “Write to John Fox about it.”  The leading article was headed

“AN APPEAL.”

“Foxes of Britain!” it began; “opposed though we have always been to revolutionary politics, a clear line is indicated to us out of the throes of the Re-birth.  The old feudal relations between Foxes and Men have had their day.  The England that has been the paradise of the wealthy, of the pink-coated, of the doubly second-horsed, must become that of the oppressed, the hunted, the hand-to-mouth liver.  In a word, we have had enough of Fox-Hounds; henceforth we will have Hound-Foxes.”

Then the policy was outlined.  Foxes could not hunt hounds—­no; but they could lead them a dog’s life.  They had been in the past too sporting; thought too little of their own safety, too much of the pleasure of the Hunt and of the reputation of its country.

Henceforth the League of Hound-Foxes would dispense justice to the oppressors.  No more forty-minute bursts over the best line in the country; no more grass and easy fences; no more favourable crossing points at the Whissendine Brook; no more rhapsodies in The Field over “a game and gallant fox.”