The day proved as glorious as the night had been serene, but for the hare it was all too long. He could hardly sit in his form, so eager was he to be afoot, and the moment the stars peeped he quitted the seat. What miles on miles he traversed: he visited the hills, he penetrated to the cliffs of Morvah, he turned inland again and roamed wide stretches of moor and down, he skirted Chun[8] cromlech, and passed within sight of the Men Scryfa as he headed for the Galver, with its upthrust peak conspicuous against the stars. From the Galver he went to Hannibal’s Carn, and presently stood on its highest rock gazing at the plain beneath. His ears were pricked as they had been a score times since sundown to catch the whispers of the waste and perhaps hear the bleat of a doe. He listened as he had never listened before; but there came no call, no sound indeed save the murmur of the dawn wind about the crags; so at last the love-sick fellow forsook his station and returned to the Galver, where after weaving a maze of trails he sought a form high up the slope. In his lone retreat he felt as safe as on Chapel Carn Brea; he was even more remote from the haunts of man. Yet harriers were already on their way to the meet, and it was that very ground where he sat that was to be hunted. The Squire of Trengwainton had breakfasted by candlelight, and as the clock over the stables was striking half-past six, he mounted his favourite grey mare and started out attired in full hunting costume, green coat, white breeches, boots reaching almost to the knee, and a velvet cap that well became his clean-shaven face. Twelve couple of hounds followed at his horse’s heels, the little procession as it made its way along the avenue of beeches being closed by Sam Noy, the whipper-in. Coming to the high ground beyond the Forest Carn where the track forks, the squire turned in his saddle and asked which road he should take. “The lower road, Sir Tudor,” was the prompt reply. Strange though it seems that the Squire of Trengwainton should ask his way to the meet, the explanation is simple. He had arrived in Cornwall from Pembroke only three weeks earlier, after a voyage exciting even for those disturbed times. The schooner in which he sailed was attacked off the Land’s End by a privateer which had been harassing St Ives, and compelled to run before the wind in order to escape capture. Under cover of darkness she got away, and reached St Ives with no more damage than a hole in her mainsail and the loss of her topmast. But the mayor and the watch mistaking the rakish-looking craft for another Frenchman, had opened fire from the three four-pounders on the “Island”—luckily without effect, the balls dropping at least fifty yards short.