At length a “most agreeable evening” is got through; and as each group whisks away, there is a general exclamation of “What a most extraordinary taste everything had of—————” What do you think, gentle reader?
“What! none of you able to guess! And yet everybody at table hit off directly!”
“All give it up?” Brown, Jones, and Robinson?
“But how came it there?” asks Mrs. Brown.
The Major’s famous cow Strawberry-cream’s calf was ill, and they had tapped a pint of fine “cold-drawn” for it, which Monsieur Jean Rougier happening to upset, just mopped it up with his napkin, and chucking it away, it was speedily adopted by the hind’s little girl in charge of the plates and dishes, who imparted a most liberal castor oil flavour to everything she touched.
And that entertainment is now known by the name of the “Castor Oil Dinner.”
CHAPTER XXII. A HUNTING MORNING.—UNKENNELING.
WHAT a commotion there was in the house the next morning! As great a disturbance as if the Major had been going to hunt an African Lion, a royal Bengal Tiger, or a Bison itself. _Ring-ring-ring-ring_ went one bell, _tinkle-tinkle-tinkle_ went another, _ring-ring-ring_ went the first again, followed by exclamations of “There’s master’s bell again!” with such a running down stairs, and such a getting up again. Master wanted this, master wanted that, master had carried away the buttons at his knees, master wanted his other pair of White what-do-they-call-ems—not cords, but moleskins—that treacherous material being much in vogue among masters of harriers. Then master’s boots wouldn’t do, he wanted his last pair, not the newly-footed ones, and they were on the trees, and the Bumbler was busy in the stable, and Betty Bone could not skin the trees, and altogether there was a terrible hubbub in the house. His overnight exertions, though coupled with the castor oil catastrophe, seemed to have abated none of his ardour in pursuit of the hare.
Meanwhile our little dandy, Billy, lay tumbling and tossing in bed, listening to the dread preparations, wishing he could devise an excuse for declining to join him. The recollection of his bumps, and his jumps, and his falls, arose vividly before him, and he would fain have said “no” to any more. He felt certain that the Major was going to give him a startler, more dreadful perhaps than those he had had with his lordship. Would that he was well out of it! What pleasure could there be in galloping after an animal they could shoot? In the midst of these reflections Mons. Rougier entered the apartment and threw further light on the matter by opening the shutters.