First, through the hush of night, there steals a cool, soft breath, like the sigh of some spirit of morning, longing for the dawn. Soon, swelling to a breeze, it stirs the cloud on the moor, the leaf in the copse. A bird awakes and twitters in its nest. Anon, in joyful chorus, answering notes pipe shrill and clear, through all the woodland, while a pale streak of light, low and level on the eastern ridges, peeps above the sky line. Great black masses stand out from the gloom, in deeper shadows and broader touches, soon to resolve themselves, as the eye masters their shapes, into rock and coombe, hill, valley, and hanging wood. But now the pale streak has changed to crimson, underlined with a yellow seam, the mountain puts on his crown of fire, and the highest tree-tops, in glade and valley, are tinged with flame, while, far and near, pointed peaks, rugged tors, purple heather, dusky moorland, all are tipped with gold. Then, in his blazing chariot, the lord of light comes up to run his course, and night is past and man goes forth to his labour until the evening, and the harbourer's day's work is done. "Red Rube," if he worshipped the sun at all, worshipped him less in love than fear, dreading, above all things, that his beams should cause the dews to evaporate from the sward, and harden into an unimpressionable surface the yielding clay beneath each sheltering bank, or round each bubbling spring. Rube believed that, for beauty and majesty, no object in the world could vie with the beam, and branches, the "Brow Bay and Tray" of a warrantable deer, yet he had not been a nurse-child of Nature, in all her seasons and all her moods, without learning her lessons, and imbibing for his foster-mother an instinctive love, only the deeper that it was unconscious, unsuspected, and in spite of himself. Is not this the secret of our attachment to field sports, and do not those which bring us face to face with Nature retain their fascination when every other pastime or excitement has palled on the satiated senses, the weary world-worn heart?