asked the razor-grinder, as his companion started off without the ceremony of taking farewell. "Come to the kennel at nightfall!" shouted Mike. "I will!" hallooed back Peter; and thus abruptly the two friends separated. CHAPTER V. "The skies, the fountains, every region near, WITH his heart keeping time with his heelsand both were strangely quick in their respective actions-Mike swept through briar and brake, and cleared fence, rail, and ditch, and raced over fallow and mead, until he arrived at the outskirts of the cover through which the hounds were pressing the wary fox, in the ardour and spirit of their matchless breed. For where was there such a pack as the Squire's of the Range? True it is, that they were large and somewhat heavy in proportions; but nothing would induce their owner to make the attempt of altering their form and figure. "No," he would say to a hint of modern improvement. "No: as I first knew them—and that was before I could climb into a saddle-so they shall remain. My father, and his before him, were better sportsmen than myself, and it would ill become me to change the blood." And then, indeed, if the Squire had listened with a favourable ear to the suggestion, what would Job Sykes, the huntsman, have said to the matter? Job was a queer old fellow, and regarded every opinion expressed in his hearing, about hounds and hunting, as nothing less than a positive insult. "As if I don't know every move concerning 'em," he replied, to a remote intimation that anybody might have the hardihood ought to do, or to give him, as what he what he ought not to do. "As if I wasn't up to every wrinkle! By the -, I expect we shall have a queer breed of folks presently something between bull-dogs and sucking Quakers!" Job was certainly anything but a patient man, and could not brook an affront, as he ever deemed it, of this nature. Thirty years had matured his experience as the huntsman to the Squire, and half that number he had passed in the noviciate state of whipper-in; for Job was now in the sere and yellow leaf of life, although, forsooth, there were many green branches yet on the sturdy, stalwart trunk. As he had been to his paternal progenitor, so Job's only son and heir, James Sykes, more commonly and familiarly called Jem, was the whip under his special training and guidance. For it was Job's greatest boast, that the Sykeses inherited, in regular succession, the post of honour that he then so ably filled; and he frequently pointed, with gratified vanity, to a row of very questionable portraits, hung in a line upon the wall of his snug cottage, as the likenesses of his departed ancestors; who aired in the saddle, figuratively speaking, that he now had the pleasure of sitting in. There were two of these said pictures that caused an invariable rise in Job's cachinnatory powers whenever his eyes fell upon them. They certainly must have been strange-looking originals, if the professed semblances were, in the remotest degree, worthy of credit. A bunch of powdered hair, as thick as their arms, was tied at the end with a large bow of black riband, and this reached to a little below the middle of their spines: waistcoats of the brightest scarlet reached within a narrow width of the knees of their buckskin breeches; and at this point, some dozen or more stripes of riband were fastened, so as to dangle and flutter, in the form of streamers, nearly to their ankles : above their top-boots, which were pushed as low as the creased leather would permit, a gap and intermediate space was left to show the knitted hose; but although this gave an air of negligence, yet there was a study even in the carelessness: the long ends of the white |