Sometimes, when it was known beforehand that they must encamp for the night in the greenwood, the pages and waiting-women would ride forward, in advance of the rest, with the foragers, the baggage, and a portion of the light-armed archery; and, when the shades of evening were falling, the welcome watch-setting of the mellow-winded bugles would bid the voyagers hail; and, as they opened some moon-lit grassy glade, they would behold green bowers of leafy branches, garlanded with wild roses and eglantine, and strewn with dry, soft moss, and fires sparkling bright amid the shadows, and spits turning before the blaze, and pots seething over it, suspended from the immemorial gipsy tripods. And then the horses would be unbridled, unladen, groomed, and picketed, to feed on the rich forest herbage; and the evening meal would be spread, and the enlivening wine-cup would go round, and the forest chorus would be trolled, rendered doubly sweet by the soft notes of the girls, until the bugles breathed a soft good-night, and, the females of the party withdrawing to their bowers of verdure, meet tiring rooms for Oberon and his wild Titania, the men, from the haughty baron to the humblest groom, would fold them in their cloaks, and sleep, with their feet to the watch-fires, and their untented brows toward heaven, until the woodlark, and the merle and mavis, earlier even than the village chanticleer, sounded their forest reveillé. CHAPTER XIII. THE PROGRESS. "Great mountains on his right hand, Both does and roes, dun and red, And harts aye casting up the head. Bucks that brays and harts that hailes, And hindes running into the fields, And he saw neither rich nor poor, But moss and ling and bare wild moor." SIR EGER, SIR GREYSTED, AND SIR GRYME. In this life there was much of that peculiar charm which seems to pervade all mankind, of whatever class or country, and in whatever hemisphere; which irresistibly impels him to return to his, perhaps, original and primitive state, as a nomadic being, a rover of the forest and the plain; which, while it often seduces the refined and civilized man of cities to reject all the conveniences and luxuries of polite life, for the excitement and freshness, the inartificial liberty and self-confiding independence of semi-barbarism, has never been known to allow the native savage to renounce his freeborn instincts, or to abandon his natural and truant disposition, for all the advantage, all the powers, conferred by civilization.