‘Does he fancy that it is an account of a run to tell us that “Found at * * * * cover, held away at a slapping pace for * * * * Barn, then turned down the * * * Water for a mile, and crossed the Forest; made for * * * Hill, but being headed, went by ** ** woods to D * * * where he was run into after a gallant race of * * * * hours and * * * *miles”? It is nearly as dull as a history book!’ ‘Nay, I never rode with those staghounds: and yet I can fill up his outline for him, wherever the stag was roused. Do you think that he never marked how the panting cavalcade rose and fell on the huge mile-long waves of that vast heather sea; how one long brown hill after another sunk down, greyer and greyer, behind them, and one long grey hill after another swelled up browner and browner before them; and how the sandstone rattled and flew beneath their feet, as the great horses, like Homer’s of old, “devoured up the plain;” and how they struggled down the hill-side, through bushes and rocks, and broad slipping rattling sheets of screes, and saw beneath them stag and pack galloping down the shallow glittering river-bed, throwing up the shingle, striking out the water in long glistening sheets; and how they too swept after them, down the flat valley, rounding crag and headland, which opened one after another in interminable vista, along the narrow strip of sand and rushes, speckled with stunted, moss-bearded, heather-bedded hawthorns, between the great grim lifeless mountain walls? Did he feel no pleasant creeping of the flesh that day at the sound of his own horse-hoofs, as they swept through the long ling with a sound as soft as the brushing of a woman’s tresses, and then rang down on the spongy, black, reverberating soil, chipping the honey-laden fragrant heather blossoms, and tossing them out in a rosy shower? Or, if that were really too slight a thing for the observation of an average sportsman, surely he must recollect the dying away of the hounds’ voices, as the woodland passes engulfed them, whether it were Brendon or at Badger-worthy, or any other place; how they brushed through the narrow forest paths, where the ashes were already golden, while the oaks still kept their sombre green, and the red leaves and berries of the mountain-ash showed bright beneath the dark forest aisles; and how all of a sudden the wild outcry before them seemed to stop and concentrate, thrown back, louder and louder as they rode, off the same echoing crag; till at a sudden turn of the road there stood the stag beneath them in the stream, his back against the black rock with its green cushions of dripping velvet, knee-deep in the clear amber water, the hounds around him, some struggling and swimming in the deep pool, some rolling and tossing and splashing in a mad, half-terrified ring, as he reared into the air on his great haunches, with the sparkling beads running off his red mane, and dropping on his knees, plunged his antlers down among them,