‘Worth Saint Chrysostom’s seven years’ nakedness on all-fours! And so I told the fellow, who by some cunning calculations about wind, and sun, and so forth, which he imparted to my uncomprehending ears, brought me suddenly to the top of a little crag, below which, some hundred yards off, the whole herd stood, stags, hinds—but I can’t describe them. I have not brought away a scrap of sketch, though we watched them full ten minutes undiscovered; and then the stare, and the toss of those antlers, and the rush! That broke the spell with me; for I had been staring stupidly at them, trying in vain to take in the sight, with the strangest new excitement heaving and boiling up in my throat; and at the sound of their hoofs on the turf I woke, and found the keeper staring, not at them, but at me, who, I verily believe, had something very like a tear in these excitable eyes of mine.’ ‘“Ain’t you well, sir?” said he. “You needn’t be afeard; it’s only at the fall of the year the stags is wicked.” ‘I don’t know what I answered at first; but the fellow understood me when I shook his hand frantically, and told him that I should thank him to the last day of my life, and that I would not have missed it for a thousand pounds. In part-proof whereof I gave him a sovereign on the spot, which seemed to clear my character in his eyes as much as the crying at the sight of a herd of deer had mystified it.’ ‘Claude, well-beloved,’ said I, ‘will you ever speak contemptuously of sportsmen any more?’ ‘“Do manus,” I have been vilifying them, as one does most things in the world, only for want of understanding them. How shall I do penance? Go and take service with Edwin Landseer, as pupil, colour-grinder, footboy?’ ‘You will then be very near to a very great poet,’ quoth I, ‘and one whose works will become, as centuries roll on, more and more valuable to art and to science, and, possibly, to something higher than either.’ ‘I begin to guess your meaning,’ answered Claude. ‘So we lounged, and dreamt, and fished, in heathery Highland,’ as Mr. Clough would say, while the summer snipes flitted whistling up the shallow before us, and the soft, south-eastern clouds slid lazily across the sun, and the little trout snapped and dimpled at a tiny partridge hackle, with a twist of orange silk, whose elegance for shape and colour reconciled Claude’s heart somewhat to my everlasting whipping of the water. When as last:— ‘You seem to have given up catching anything. You have not stirred a fish in this last two pools, except that little saucy yellow shrimp, who jumped over your fly, and gave a spiteful slap at it with his tail.’ Too true; and what could be the cause? Had that impudent sand-piper frightened all the fish on his way up? Had an otter paralysed them with terror for the morning? Or had a stag been down to drink? We saw the fresh slot of his broad claws, by the bye, in the mud a few yards back.