Page:Yeast. A Problem - Kingsley (1851).djvu/17



this my story will probably run counter to more than one fashion of the day, literary and other, it is prudent to bow to those fashions wherever I honestly can; and therefore to begin with a scrap of description.

The edge of a great fox-cover; a flat wilderness of low leafless oaks, fortified by a long, dreary, thorn-capped clay ditch, with sour red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a straight wood-ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horse-hoofs; some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the union, in Macintosh and antigropelos; two holiday schoolboys with trousers strapped down to bursting point, like a penny steamer’s safety-valve; a midshipman, the only merry