A mounted chamberlain, with four or five grooms, who stood still farther aloof, in the rear of the ladies in waiting, and two or three glittering pages standing a-foot among the latter, in full tide of gallantry and flirtation, their coursers held by the grooms in attendance, made up the party. From which must always be excepted the huntsman, the verdurer, and eight or ten yeomen prickers, in laced green jerkins, with round velvet caps, like those worn by the whippers-in of the present day, and huge French-horns over their left shoulders, who were seen from time to time appearing, disappearing, and reappearing in the glades and dingles of the hill-side covert, and heard now rating the untimely and fallacious challenge of some wayward and willful puppy, now cheering the earnest and trusty whimper of some redoubted veteran of the pack, as he half-opened on a scent of yester-even. The hounds had been in the coppice above an hour, and two-thirds of its length had already been drawn blank—the gentlemen were beginning to exchange anxious and wistful glances, and two or three had already consulted more than once or twice their ponderous, old-fashioned repeaters—and now the elder, shorter and fairer of the two damsels, giving the whip lightly to her chestnut palfry, cantered up to the side of Gerald Howard, followed by her companion, whose dark redundance of half-disheveled nut-brown tresses fell down from beneath a velvet cap, with a long drooping plume, on each side of a face of the most exquisite oval, with a high brow, long, jet-black eyelashes, showing in cold relief against her pure, colorless cheeks, for her eyes were downcast, and an expression of the highest intellect, which is ever found in woman mingled with all a woman’s tenderness and softness. She was something above the middle height, with a figure of rare slenderness and symmetry, exquisitely rounded, and sat her horse at once most femininely and most firmly, without the least indication of manliness in her seat or demeanor, yet with a certain of-at-homeness in her position and posture, that showed she could ride as well, perhaps as boldly, as the best man among them. “Ah! Gerald, Gerald,” said the elder girl, laughingly, as she tapped him on the arm with the silver-butt of her riding-whip, “is this your faith to fair ladies, and especially to this fairest Kate, that you deluded us from our soft beds at this untimely hour, with promise to unharbor us a stag of ten within so many minutes, all for the pleasure of our eyes, and the delectation of our hearts, and here have we been sitting on this lone hill-side two hours and upward, to the great craving of our appetites and the faintness of our hearts, yearning—as the queen’s good Puritans would have it—after creature comforts—out on you! out on you, for a false knight, as I believe not, for my part, that there is one horn or hoof from the east to the west on the hill-side—no, not from the ‘throstle’s nest’ to the ‘thorny brae.’”