In the meantime Parson Gale, sitting rather loose in the saddle, was rounding the head of the coombe in which he had been so hospitably treated, with a wandering eye, flushed cheek, and brain dizzy, from the strength of his potations. A harvest moon, high in heaven, flooded the moor with light, so that the good horse picked his way through the heather, avoiding the level patches of bog as easily as at noon-day. Cassock had learned from a foal to mind his own footsteps, to look out for himself in the scanty pastures he shared with the mountain sheep or wild red-deer on the hills where he was bred, and could skim the rush-grown swamps around the Black Pits of Exmoor, safe and swift as the very bittern that flitted across those lonely haunts. Going freely from his shoulders, but collected and prepared for effort behind the saddle, with head low, ears pointed, and the froth flying lightly from his bit, as he swayed at every stride to the turn of his rider's hand, he could sweep along at a gallop over ground where an unaccustomed horse would have stuck fast up to its girths before it had gone fifty yards. That sense, too, which we call instinct in the brute, because of its superiority to the power we call reason in the man, forbade him to venture on any surface wholly incapable of affording foothold; and it would have required all the persuasions of consummate horsemanship from his rider to beguile Cassock into a real, unmitigated, fathomless Devonshire bog. The horse was bred on the moor, and on the moor had never yet met his match. To-night he seemed more careful than usual, edging from side to side under his burden, as though conscious that on him, the drinker of water, must devolve the duty of balancing his master, the drinker of ale! He knew his way home, too, and could have found it like a dog; nor would he have objected to increase the pace considerably had he received the slightest indication that his lord was inclined for a gallop. The Parson, however, had fallen into a meditative mood; such a mood as might possess a rough imaginative nature amongst the fairest scenes in England on a mellow autumn night. He paced along the sheep-track Cassock had selected at a walk, now stroking his horse's neck with maudlin kindness, now looking about him over the moonlit heather in affable approval; anon sighing deeply, and raising his eyes to heaven, with a meaningless smile.