“What does it mean, dear?” I venture. “It means that you had not been gone an hour when I found Ted with that little two-ounce phial you left half filled with laudanum on the lower pantry shelf yesterday. He had evidently climbed a chair and reached it down. The cork was out and the bottle was empty. You can perhaps imagine my feelings. I didn't know whether he had taken the stuff or not, but was in an agony of anxiety on the point, you may be sure. The doctor was away hunting, you were away hunting, and here was I fairly consumed with apprehension lest my baby had poisoned himself.” Like a flash the whole mystery of my stupor sleep revealed itself to me. “Baby barlo”--flask--laudanum phial--whiskey--it was all as clear as day. I said: “But it transpires he hadn't taken any of the laudanum, eh?” “Yes, thank Heaven! But for all of you-----” “Listen, please. All I want to say is that what Ted missed I got. Do you understand?” “Do _I_ understand! Are _you_ in your sane and sober senses, William?” “I have a shrewd suspicion that I am,” I replied, with a slight laugh, “and being so, I will repeat it: Baby didn't down the poison; but I guess I made up for that, because _I did!_” Then I told her the story. Of course I gained my point. It ended with---- but, no matter. The Judge stood the supper in consideration of quail on toast being incorporated in the menu, and we sat around the festive board in the Queen's Arms a week later, and talked over our Xmas Eve hunting match. No one was disposed to question the sentiment in a speech by the Doc, who declared: “Fellows, our prowess as a gun club is growing, and I verily believe the old district is getting to be once more something like a half-decent hunting ground. Let us keep together, be as men and brothers always, and--I was nearly overlooking it--let us invariably wash out our pocket pistols before filling 'em up afresh.” HERNE THE HUNTER, By William Perry Brown |Herne the Hunter was tall, brown and grizzled. The extreme roundness of his shoulders indicated strength rather than infirmity, while the severing of his great neck at a blow would have made a feudal executioner famous in his craft. An imaginative man might have divined something comely beneath the complex conjunction of lines and ridges that made up his features, but it would have been more by suggestion, however, than by any actual resemblance to beauty traceable thereon. The imprint of strength, severity and endurance was intensified by an open contempt of appearance; only to a subtle second-sight was revealed aught nobler, sweeter and sadder, like faint stars twinkling behind filmy clouds. Some town-bred Nimrod, with a misty Shakespearean memory, had added to his former patronymic of “Old Herne” that of Windsor's ghostly visitor. The mountaineers saw the fitness of the title, and “Herne the Hunter” became widely current.