Harshaw’s pursuits had not been those of a Nimrod, and although a good horseman and a fair marksman, he had found himself at a grievous disadvantage with others of the party who were mountaineers and crack shots. Stimulated by rivalry, they had achieved prodigies in instances of quickness of sight and unerring aim in unpropitious, almost impossible circumstances. They had already had some good sport, in which he had acquitted himself creditably enough; but his inexperience and ignorance of the topography of the country had given him some occasion to perceive that without more familiarity with the localities he could not fully enjoy a camp hunt. He was not surprised when, becoming involved in an almost impenetrable tangle of the laurel, he lost his companions, who got over the broken ground with an amazing swiftness, divination of direction, and quickness of resource. He drew rein upon emerging, and listened to the baying hounds: now loud, now faint and far away; now sharply yelping for the lost trail, and again lifting the exultant, bell-like cry of bated triumph. He despaired of rejoining his friends till the deer was lost or killed, and, remembering the pluck of the _personnel_ of the diversion, of the deer, the hounds, and the mountaineers, he reflected that this result might not soon ensue. The echoes infinitely confused the sounds, giving no reliable suggestion of the direction which the hunt was taking. He pushed on for a time—a long time, his watch told him—in the complete silence of the wintry woods. He began to experience a dull growing apprehensiveness. He had no faint approximative conjecture concerning the locality; there was no path, not even a herders’ trail. He could himself establish no landmark by which he might be guided. There was a lavish repetitiousness in the scene: grand as it might be with scarred cliffs and sudden chasms and stupendous trees, it was presented anew with prolific magnificence forty yards further, and ride as he might he seemed to make no progress. As time passed, there recurred to his recollection instances—rare, it is true, but as uninviting to the imagination as infrequent—of men who have been lost in these fastnesses, trained woodsmen, herders, the familiars of the wild nature into whose penetralia even they had ventured too far. A handful of bleaching bones might tell the story, or perhaps the mysterious disappearance would be explained by much circling of birds of prey. Mr. Harshaw felt a sudden violent appreciation of the methods and interests and affluent attractiveness of the civilized world. He could not sufficiently condemn his folly in venturing out of its beaten track; in leaving, even for a space, the things he loved for the things he cared not for. The scene was inexpressibly repugnant to him; the woods closed him in so frowningly; his mind recoiled from the stern, Gorgon-like faces of the crags on every hand. The wintry sunlight was reddening; he