O let me never know that any base affection should get any lordship in your thoughts.” But as he was speaking more, Kalander came and brake off their discourse with inviting them to the hunting of a goodly stag, which being harboured in a wood thereby, he hoped would make them good sport, and drive away some part of Daiphantus’s melancholy. They condescended, and so going to their lodgings, furnished themselves as liked them, Diaphantus writing a few words which he sealed in a letter against their return. Then went they together abroad, the good Kalander entertaining them with pleasant discoursing, how well he loved the sport of hunting when he was a young man, how much, in the comparison thereof, he disdained all chamber-delights, that the fun (how great a journey soever he had to make) could never prevent him with earliness, nor the moon, with her sober countenance, dissuade him from watching till midnight for the deer feeding. “O,” said he, “you will never live to my age, without you keep yourselves in breath with exercise, and in heart with joyfulness. Too much {45} thinking doth consume the spirits, and oft it falls out that while one thinks too much of his doing, he leaves to do the effect of his thinking.” Then spared he not to remember how much Arcadia was changed since his youth: activity and good fellowship being nothing in the price it was then held in; but, according to the nature of the old growing world, still worse and worse. Then would he tell them stories of such gallants as he had known: and so with pleasant company beguiled the time’s haste, and shortened the way’s length, till they came to the side of the wood, where the hounds were in couples staying their coming, but with a whining accent craving liberty, many of them in colour and marks so resembling, that it shewed they were of one kind. The huntsmen handsomely attired in their green liveries as though they were children of summer, with staves in their hands to beat the guiltless earth when the hounds were at a fault, and with horns about their necks to sound an alarm upon a silly fugitive: the hounds were straight uncoupled, and ere long the stag thought it better to trust to the nimbleness of his feet than to the slender fortification of his lodging: but even his feet betrayed him, for howsoever they went, they themselves uttered themselves to the scent of their enemies, who one taking it of another, and sometimes believing the wind’s advertisement, sometimes the view of their faithful counsellors, the huntsmen, with open mouths then denounced war, when the war was already begun; their cry being composed of so well-sorted mouths, that any man would perceive therein some kind of proportion, but the skilful woodmen did find a music. Then delight, and variety of opinion, drew the horsemen sundry ways, yet cheering their hounds with voice and horn, kept still, as it were, together. The wood seemed to conspire with them against his own citizens,