“Your lodge, indeed” said Phœbe; “you are very bold, for a poor kill-buck that never frightened any thing before save a dun deer—_Your_ lodge, indeed!—I am like to go there, I think.” “Hush, hush! Phœbe— here is no time for jesting. Down to my hut, I say, like a deer, for the knight and Mrs. Alice are both there, and I fear will not return hither again.—All’s naught, girl—and our evil days are come at last with a vengeance—we are fairly at bay and fairly hunted down.” “Can this be, Joceline?” said the poor girl, turning to the keeper with an expression of fright in her countenance, which she had hitherto averted in rural coquetry. “As sure, my dearest Phœbe, as”— The rest of the asseveration was lost in Phœbe’s ear, so closely did the keeper’s lips approach it; and if they approached so very near as to touch her cheek, grief, like impatience, hath its privileges, and poor Phœbe had enough of serious alarm to prevent her from demurring upon such a trifle. But no trifle was the approach of Joceline’s lips to Phœbe’s pretty though sunburnt cheek, in the estimation of the Independent, who, a little before the object of Joceline’s vigilance, had been more lately in his turn the observer of the keeper’s demeanour, so soon as the interview betwixt Phœbe and him had become so interesting. And when he remarked the closeness of Joceline’s argument, he raised his voice to a pitch of harshness that would have rivalled that of an ungreased and rusty saw, and which at once made Joceline and Phœbe spring six feet apart, each in contrary directions, and if Cupid was of the party, must have sent him out at the window like it wild duck flying from a culverin. Instantly throwing himself into the attitude of a preacher and a reprover of vice, “How now!” he exclaimed, “shameless and impudent as you are!—What—chambering and wantoning in our very presence!—How— would you play your pranks before the steward of the Commissioners of the High Court of Parliament, as ye would in a booth at the fulsome fair, or amidst the trappings and tracings of a profane dancing-school, where the scoundrel minstrels make their ungodly weapons to squeak, ‘Kiss and be kind, the fiddler’s blind?’—But here,” he said, dealing a perilous thump upon the volume—“Here is the King and high priest of those vices and follies!—Here is he, whom men of folly profanely call nature’s miracle!—Here is he, whom princes chose for their cabinet-keeper, and whom maids of honour take for their bed-fellow!— Here is the prime teacher of fine words, foppery and folly—Here!”— (dealing another thump upon the volume—and oh! revered of the Roxburghe, it was the first folio—beloved of the Bannatyne, it was Hemmings and Condel—it was the _editio princeps_)—“On thee,” he continued—“on thee, William Shakspeare, I charge whate’er of such lawless idleness and immodest folly hath defiled the land since thy day!”