Now for the first time in my life I enjoyed in full measure all that I had longed for all my life: forest and field and sea-shore, unlimited space, and freedom to wander through all these at my pleasure from the earliest dawn until far in the night, and a companion besides than whom no fitter could be desired by a youth whose ambition it was to excel in these profitless, ruinous arts. The "Wild Zehren's" eye was perhaps not so keen nor his hand so steady as they had been ten or twenty years before, but he was still an excellent shot, and a master in everything belonging to field-sports. No one knew better than he where to find the game; no one had such well-trained dogs, or could handle them so well as he; no one could so skilfully take advantage of all the chances of the chase; and above all, no one was so delightful a companion. If his ardor during the sport carried all away with him, no one could so happily choose the resting-place in the cool edge of the forest or under the thin shade of a little copse by the side of a brook, or so charmingly entertain the tired party with mirth and jest and the most capitally-told stories. But he always seemed most charming to me when we two together were on a long tramp. If in a large company of sportsmen he could not conceal a certain imperious manner, and the better success of another filled him with envy which found vent in acrid sarcasms, there was no trace of all this when he was with me. He taught me all the arts, adroit expedients, and minor dexterities of woodcraft, in which he was so well skilled, and was delighted to find me so apt a scholar; indeed he often laughed heartily when I brought down a bird which he had marked for his own gun. And then his talk, to which I always listened with new delight! It was the strangest mingling of excellently-told sporting stories and anecdotes, acute observations of nature, and biting satire upon mankind, especially the fairer half of it. In the life of the Wild Zehren, women had played an important and disastrous part. Like so many men of ardent passions and fierce desires, he had probably never sought for true love, and now he charged it as a crime upon the sex, that he had never found it; not even with that unhappy lady whom he had carried off from her home under such terrible circumstances, and who brought him nothing but her parents' curse, beauty which faded but too soon, and a narrow, bigoted spirit, uncultured and perhaps incapable of culture, which already bore in itself the germs of madness.