It was a clear, bright Sabbath morning, as ever shone down on a sinful world, on which we started homeward--and, though I fear there was not quite so much solemnity in our demeanor as might have best accorded with the notions of over strict professors, I can still answer that, with much mirth, much merriment, and much good feeling in our hearts, there was no touch of irreverence, or any taint of what could be called sinful thought. The sun had risen fairly, but the hour was still too early for the sweet peaceful music of the church-going bells to have made their echoes tunable through the rich valley. A merry cavalcade, indeed, we started--Harry leading the way at his usual slap-dash pace, so that one, less a workman than himself, would have said he went up hill and down at the same break-neck pace, and would take all the grit out of his team before he had gone ten miles--while a more accurate observer would have seen, at a glance, that he varied his rate at almost every inequality of road, that he quartered every rut, avoided every jog or mud-hole, husbanded for the very best his horses' strength, never making them either pull or hold a moment longer than was absolutely necessary from the abruptness of the ground. At his left hand sat I, while Tom, in honor of his superior bulk and weight, occupied with his magnificent and portly person the whole of the back seat, keeping his countenance as sanctified as possible, and nodding, with some quaint and characteristic observation, to each one of the scattered groups of country-people, which we encountered every quarter of a mile for the first hour of our route, wending their way toward the village church--but, when we reached the forest-mantled road which clombe the mountain, making the arched woods resound to many a jovial catch or merry hunting chorus. Mounted sublime on an arm-chair lashed to the forepart of the pig-box, sat Timothy in state--his legs well muffled in a noble scarlet-fringed buffalo skin, and his body encased in his livery top-coat--the setters and the spaniels crouching most meekly at his feet, and the two noble bucks--the fellow on whose steaks we had already made an inroad, having been left as fat Tom's portion--securely corded down upon a pile of straw, with their sublime and antlered crests drooping all spiritless and humble over the backboard, toward the frozen soil which crashed and rattled under the ponderous hoofs of the magnificent roan horse--Tom's special favorite--which, though full seventeen hands high, and heavy in proportion; yet showing a good strain of blood, trotted away with his huge load at full ten miles an hour.