It was a gay and stirring scene. The meadow, late so quiet in its uniform green garniture, was now alive with fluttering plumes, and glittering with many-colored scarfs and cassocks, noble steeds of all hues, blood-bay and golden chestnut, dappled and roan, and gleamy blacks, and one, on which rode the foremost of the noble Normans, white as December's snow; and in the middle of the picture, aroused by the shouts in his rear, and aware of the presence of his fresh pursuers, the superb stag, with his neck far stretched out, and his grand antlers pressed close along his back, straining every nerve, and literally seeming to fly over the level sward; while the snow-white alans, with their fierce black eyes glowing like coals of fire, and their blood-red tongues lolling from their open jaws, breathless and mute, but stanch as vindictive fiends, hung hard upon his traces. At first, the hunted stag laid his course upward, diagonally, aiming for the forest land on the hillside; and although, at first, he had scarce thirty yards of law, and was, moreover, so nearly matched in speed by his relentless enemies, that, for many hundred yards, he neither gained nor lost a yard's distance, still he gradually gathered way, as yards fell into furlongs, furlongs into miles, and drew ahead slowly, but surely, until it appeared almost certain that he must soon gain the shelter of the tall timber, where the keen eyes of the alans, impotent of scent, would be worthless in pursuit, and where he must again be dislodged by slow hounds, or the chase abandoned. Just as he was within fifty yards, however, of the desired covert's edge, Sir Philip de Morville--for he it was who rode the foremost--raised his bugle to his lips, and sounded it long and shrill, in a most peculiar strain, to which a whoop responded, almost from the point for which the stag was making, and, at the same time, a second brace of alans--one a jet black, and the other a deep-brindled fawn color--darted out, and flew down the gentle slope, right at the head of the yet unwearied quarry. Springing high into air, he instantly made a perfect demivolte, with an angry toss of his antlers, and shot, with redoubled efforts in the contrary direction, cutting across the very noses of his original pursuers, which, when they had turned likewise, were brought within fifty yards of his haunches, and away like an arrow toward the bridge across the Idle. From this moment, the excitement of the spectacle was redoubled; nor could any one, even the coldest of spectators, have looked on without feeling the blood course, like molten lava, through his veins.