The immediate summit of the slope I have mentioned is bare, yet conspicuous for a single tree, the only one of its kind existing for many miles in that district—a single white pine, tall enough for the mast of some huge admiral, and as such visible, it is said, from points in the four northern provinces of England, and the two southernmost of Scotland—whence it is known far and wide, in many a border lay and legend, as the one-tree hill on Reedswood.[2] Below the bare brow of this inland promontory, for such indeed it is, which is covered with beautiful, short, mossy grass, as firm and soft as the greensward of a modern race-course, and used as one vast pasture of two hundred acres, lies a vast tract of coppice, principally of oak and birch, but interspersed with expanses of waving heather, where the soil is too shallow to support a larger growth, and dotted here and there with bold, gray crags which have cropped out above the surface, and amongst these, few and far between, some glorious old, gnarled hawthorns, which may well have furnished May-wreaths to the yellow-haired daughters of the Saxon before the mailed-foot of the imperious Norman had dinted the green turf of England. This coppice overspread the whole declivity and base of the hill, until it melted into the broad, rich meadows, which, with a few scattered woods of small size, and here and there a patch of yellow wheat, or a fragrant bean-field, filled all the bottom of the great strath or valley, down to the banks of a large stream, beyond which the land rose steeply, first in rough moorland pastures, divided by dry stone walls, then in round heathery swells, then in great, broad-backed purple fells, and beyond all, faintly traceable in the blue haze of distance, in the vast ridges of the Cheviots and the hills of Tevydale. Along the base of the hill-side, parting it from the meadows, ran a tall, oak park-paling, made of rudely split planks, not any where less than five feet in height, through which access was given to the valley by heavy gates of the same material, from two or three winding wood-roads into the shadowy lanes of the lovely lower country. Such was the scene, o’er which there arose before the sun, startling the hill echoes far and near, and silencing the grouse-cocks on the moors, and the song-birds in the brake and thicket by their tumultuous din, the shouts and fanfares that told the hunt was up. “Tayho! Tayho!” Tarà-tarà-tara-tantara-râ-taratantara-tantara-rà-rà-râh. Which being interpreted into verbal dog-talk is conceived to say—“Gone-away! gone-away! gone-away! away! away! away!” and is immediately understood as such not by the well-mounted sportsmen only, but by what Scott calls, himself no unskilled woodsman, “the dauntless trackers of the deer,” who rush full-mouthed to the cheery clangor, filling all earth and ether with the musical discords of their sweet chidings.