Mrs. Edward Kennard by Helen C. Black — Read

There is great wailing and lamentation at Market Harboro'. King Frost holds the ground in an iron grip. Fresh snow falling almost daily spreads yet another and another layer, and all is encrusted hard and fast, but far around it sparkles like a sea of diamonds, emitting the colours of a rainbow in the radiant sunshine. Horses are eating their heads off and are ready to jump out of their skins; hounds are getting fat and lazy; the majority of the sportsmen have long ago taken themselves off to London, Monte Carlo, and elsewhere, and the few who remain spend their days in skating, toboganning, and curling.

While the barometer averages nightly ten to twenty degrees of frost, perhaps the most favourable moment has arrived to find one's hunting friends freed from the daily labour they so cheerfully undergo for the sake of sport. As in ordinary weather a protracted hunt with Mr. Fernie's hounds, or a long day with the Pytchley, would at this season have kept Mrs. Edward Kennard to a late hour in the saddle, you gladly seize the opportunity afforded, and accept a kind invitation to visit her at "The Barn. " A two-hours' run from St. Pancras to Leicestershire, with a change at Kettering, lands you at Market Harboro' station, where a neat brougham, drawn by a pair of handsome brown horses (with no bearing reins), waits to convey you to Mr. Edward Kennard's hunting box, which stands back between two fields of ridge and furrow in the main road from Kettering to Market Harboro'.