“Ah! sister mine, art so incredulous—but I will wager you or ere the Talbots reach that great gray stone, with the birch boughs waving over it like the plumes, as our bright Kate would say, of a dead warrior’s helmet over his cold brow, we _will_ have a stag a-foot—ay, and a stag of ten.” And instantly raising his voice to a quicker and clearer note—“See now!” he cried, “see now!” as a superb, dark-colored animal, not lower than a yearling colt at the forehand, leaped with a bound as agile as if he was aided by wings, on the cope-stone of the dry stone wall which bounded the hither side of the hill coppice, with vast, branching antlers tossed as if in defiance, and a swan-like neck swollen with pride and anger. He stood there an instant, self-poised, self-balanced, “like the herald Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill”—uttered a hoarse, belling cry, peculiar to the animal in his season, and then sailing forth in a long, easy curve, alighted on the springy turf, whose enameled surface he scarce dinted, and then swept up the gentle slope almost toward the admiring group on the brow, but in a diagonally curved line that would carry him in the long run to the south-west of them, at the distance of perhaps a hundred yards. “Tayho! Tayho!” burst in a clear and cheery shout from the excited lips of Gerald Howard. And instantly from every part of the hill-side from east to west, from the throstle’s nest to the “thorny brae,” from ten well-blown French-horns burst the wild call Tarà-tarà—tara-tantara-ra—tara-tantara-tantara—ra—ra—rah—“Gone away—gone away—gone away—away—away!” and the fierce rally of the mighty Talbots broke into tongue at once through the whole breadth and length of the oak coppice, as they came pouring up the hills, making the heather bend and the coppice crash before them like those famed Spartan hounds of Hercules and Cadmus, “When in the woods of Crete they bayed the bear— So flewed, so randed, and their heads were hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew; Crook-kneed and dew-lapped like Thessalian bulls; Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells Each under each”