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November, with its darkening afternoons and smell of burning weeds, found me gradually becoming acclimatized to "the new mare," as I importantly called her (using Dixonian phraseology). The groom was able to give me all his attention, since my aunt never rode in the winter. We now went longer distances; sometimes he would tell me that we were "on the edge of the Dumborough country," and he would pull up and point out to me, a few miles away, some looming covert where they often went to draw.
The Dumborough, as I afterwards discovered, was a scrambling sort of country to hunt in -- heavily wooded and hilly. But as we turned away from its evening-lighted landscape I would listen eagerly to Dixon's anecdotes of the sport he had seen there. He spoke often of Mr. Macdoggart, Lord Dumborough's hard-riding agent, and how one year he had seen him win the Hunt Steeplechase by a short head from a famous "gentleman-rider"; and how, another year, Mr. Macdoggart had got concussion of the brain while riding in the same race.