I noticed that one of the fine animals had separated himself from the rest of the herd by the shady brook, and was coming out to meet me, looking very important. Presently he put down his head, gave the earth a scrape with his foot, and then came jumping towards me, bounding and plunging over the hillocks, like a ship on a heavy sea. I turned right around, just as I did when I saw the bear, and I remembered that Master Lewis might not like to have me venture too far in my first hunting expedition. I ran! didn't I run? I soon heard the same deep sound again, "nearer, clearer, deadlier than before," as the reading book says. I had almost regained the top of the hill, when the animal bellowed almost right behind me. There was a tree close by, and I went _up_. It was just as easy for me to climb it as though it had been a ladder. The animal bounded up the hill, and stood under the tree, pawing the earth and making the same hollow noise. I drew my bow, and let fly an arrow at him. "Boy, come down!" There was a thick, fat man, with a great stomach, coming up the hill. He appeared greatly excited, and quite out of breath. He presently arrived at the foot of the tree. "Boy, bring me that bow and arrow." I came down the tree more scared at the man than I was at the animal. I handed him the bow, and what do you think he did with it? He gave me a dreadful cut across my back, and said,-- "Where'd yer come from? Take _that_ and That, and THAT, and don't yer ever trespass on my grounds again." I promised him I never would. I walked just as fast as I could towards the gate, and when I came to the road I was so flustrated that I went the wrong way, and wandered about in the heat for hours before I could get rightly directed towards Nottingham. I wish you were with us at Oxford; it seems to me the most beautiful place in all the world. It was here we heard the skylark sing. Tommy. The next journey of the Club was indeed _en zigzag_. "I have allowed you to visit," said Master Lewis to the boys, "the places to which your reading has led your curiosity, most of which places I have visited before. I now wish to take you to a ruin that I have never seen, and of which you may have never heard. It is the place where, according to tradition, Christianity was first established in Great Britain; where St. Patrick is said to have preached, and where he was buried. It is the place which poetry associates with the mission and miracles of Joseph of Arimathæa; here his staff, in the shape of the white thorn, is said to blossom every Christmas." "Glastonbury Abbey," said Ernest Wynn. "Of course there can be no truth in the tradition of Joseph of Arimathæa and the White Thorn?"