Imagine a knotty, umbrageous tree six or seven feet high, standing in the middle of this stall. At the foot of the tree were grouped, on a bed of bright green fern, a young wild boar, a magnificent fallow deer, two years old, the proper age for venison, and two fine roebucks. These animals were lying in a restful position, the head gently bent over the shoulder, as if they were in their accustomed haunts in the depths of the forest. Long flexible branches of ivy fell from the lower boughs of the tree, among whose glossy leaves could be seen hares and rabbits, alternating with the wild geese of ashen-gray colour, wild ducks with green heads and feathers tipped with white, pheasants with scarlet eyes and necks of changeable blue and plumage shining like burnished copper; and silver-coloured bustards, a bird of passage quite rare in our climate. Here and there, branches of holly with purple berries, and the rosy bloom of heather mingled gracefully with the game disposed at different heights. Then came groups of woodcocks, gray partridges, red partridges, gold-coloured plovers, water-hens as black as ebony, with yellow beaks; upon the highest boughs the most delicate game was suspended,--quails, thrushes, fig-peckers, and rails, those kings of the plain; and finally, at the top of the tree, a magnificent heath-cock, caught, no doubt, in the mountains of Ardennes, seemed to open his broad wings of brown, touched with blue, and hover over this hecatomb of game. [Illustration: "_The most delicate game was suspended._" Original etching by Adrian Marcel.] Leonard, an agile, slender lad with a fawn-coloured eye, and frank, resolute face, contemplated his work with admiration, giving here and there a finishing touch, contrasting the red of a partridge with the green branch of a juniper-tree, or the shining ebony of a water-hen with the bright rose of the heather bloom. "I have informed these gentlemen of your frightful trade, my bad boy," said Doctor Gasterini to his nephew Leonard, with a smile. "My lord canon and the saintly abbé will pray for the salvation of your soul." "Oh, oh, my good uncle!" replied Leonard, good-naturedly, "I would rather have them pray for success in shooting the two finest deer, as company for the wild boar I have killed, whose head and fillets I present to you, uncle." "Alas, alas, he is incorrigible!" said Doctor Gasterini, "and unhappily, my lord canon, you have no idea of the deliciousness of the flavour peculiar to the minced fillets and properly stuffed head of a year-old wild boar, seasoned à la Saint Hubert! Ah, my dear canon, how rich, how juicy! It was right to put this divine dish under the protection of the patron saint of the chase. But let us pass on," continued the doctor, preceding Dom Diégo, who was fascinated and dazzled by a display entirely novel to him, for such wealth of game is unknown in Spain.