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‘Plusieurs ont gemis là bas,’ said M. Viollet le Duc’s foreman of the works, as he led us out of that evil hole, to look, with eyes and hearts refreshed by the change, at a curious Visigothic tower, in which the good bishop Sidonius Apollinaris may have told of the last Burgundian invasion of his Auvergne to the good king Theodoric of the West Goths.

If anyone wishes to learn what the Middle Ages were like, let him go to Carcassone and see.

And now onward to Narbonne—or rather, to what was once Narbonne; one of the earliest colonies ever founded by the Romans; then the capital of the Visigothic kingdom; then of an Arab kingdom: now a dull fortified town—of a filth unspeakable, and not to be forgotten or forgiven.  Stay not therein an hour, lest you take fever, or worse: but come out of the gate over the drawbridge, and stroll down the canal.  Look back a moment, though, across the ditch.  The whole face of the wall is a museum of Roman gods, tombs, inscriptions, bas-reliefs: the wreck of Martial’s ‘Pulcherrima Narbo,’ the old Roman city, which was demolished by Louis XIII., to build the ugly fortifications of the then new fashion, now antiquated and useless.  Take one glance, and walk on, to look at live Nature—far more interesting than dead Art.

Everything fattens in the close damp air of the canal.  The great flat, with its heavy crops, puts you in mind of the richest English lowland—save for the total want of old meadows.  The weeds on the bank are English in type, only larger and richer—as becomes the climate.  But as you look among them, you see forms utterly new and strange, whose kinship you cannot fancy, but which remind you that you are nearing Italy, and Greece, and Africa.  And in the hedges are great bay-trees; and inside them, orchards of standard fig and white mulberry, with its long yearling shoots of glorious green—soon to be stripped bare for the silkworms; and here and there long lines of cypresses, black against the bright green plain and bright blue sky.  No; you are not in Britain.  Certainly not; for there is a drake (not a duck) quacking with feeble treble in that cypress, six feet over your head; and in Britain drakes do not live in trees.  You look for the climbing palmipede, and see nothing: nor will you see; for the quacker is a tiny green tree-frog, who holds on by the suckers at the ends of his toes (with which he can climb a pane of glass, like a fly), and has learnt the squirrel’s art of going invisible, without ‘the receipt of fern-seed,’ by simply keeping always on the further side of the branch.

But come back; for the air even here is suggestive of cholera and fever.  The uncleanliness of these Narbonnois is shameless and shocking; and ‘immondices’ of every kind lie festering in the rainless heat.  The sickened botanist retreats, and buys a bottle of Eau Bully—alias aromatic vinegar.

There, crowding yon hill, with handsome houses and churches, is Beziers—the blood-stained city.  Beneath the pavement of that church, it is said, lie heaped together the remains of thousands of men, women, and children, slaughtered around their own altars, on that fatal day, when the Legate Amalric, asked by the knights how they should tell Catholics from heretics, cried, “Kill them all—the Lord will know his own.”

We will pass on.  We have had enough of horrors.  And, beside, we are longing to hurry onward; for we are nearing the Mediterranean now.  There are small skiffs lying under the dark tower of Agde, another place of blood, fitly built of black lava blocks, the offspring of the nether pit.  The railway cuts through rolling banks of dark lava; and now, ahead of us, is the conical lava-hill of Cette, and the mouth of the Canal du Midi.

There it is, at last.  The long line of heavenly blue; and over it, far away, the white-peaked lateen sails, which we have seen in pictures since our childhood; and there, close to the rail, beyond the sand-hills, delicate wavelets are breaking for ever on a yellow beach, each in exactly the same place as the one which fell before.  One glance shows us children of the Atlantic, that we are on a tideless sea.

There it is,—the sacred sea.  The sea of all civilization, and almost all history, girdled by the fairest countries in the world; set there that human beings from all its shores might mingle with each other, and become humane—the sea of Egypt, of Palestine, of Greece, of Italy, of Byzant, of Marseilles, and this Narbonnaise, ‘more Roman than Rome herself,’ to which we owe the greater part of our own progress; the sea, too, Algeria and Carthage, and Cyrene, and fair lands now desolate, surely not to be desolate for ever;—the sea of civilization.  Not only to the Christian, nor to the classic scholar, but to every man to whom the progress of his race from barbarism toward humanity is dear, should the Mediterranean Sea be one of the most august and precious objects on this globe; and the first sight of it should inspire reverence and delight, as of coming home—home to a rich inheritance in which he has long believed by hearsay, but which he sees at last with his own mortal corporal eyes.

Exceedingly beautiful is that first view of the sea from Cette, though altogether different in character from the views of the Mediterranean which are common in every gallery of pictures.  There is nothing to remind one of Claude, or Vernet, or Stanfield.  No mountain-ranges far aloft, no cliffs toppling into the water, with convents and bastides perched on their crags; and seaports, with their land-locked harbours, and quaint lighthouses, nestling on the brink.  That scenery begins on the other side of the Rhone mouth, and continues, I believe, almost without interruption, to the shores of Southern Palestine, one girdle of perpetual beauty.

But here, the rail runs along a narrow strip of sand, covered with straggling vines, and tall white iris, between the sea and the great Etang de Thau, a long narrow salt-lake, beyond which the wide lowlands of the Herault slide gently down, There is not a mountain, hardly a hill, visible for miles: but all around is the great sheet of blue glassy water: while the air is as glassy clear as the water, and through it, at seemingly immense distances, the land shows purple and orange, blue and grey, till the landscape is one great rainbow.  White ships slide to and from far-off towns; fishermen lounge on the marshes, drying long lines of net.  Everywhere is vastness, freedom, repose gentle and yet not melancholy; because with all, under the burning blue, there is that fresh wholesome heat, which in itself is life, and youth, and joy.

Beyond, nearer the mouths of the Rhone, there are, so men say, desolate marshes, tenanted by herds of half-wild horses; foul mud-banks, haunted by the pelican and the flamingo, and waders from the African shore; a region half land, half water, where dwell savage folk, decimated by fever and ague.  But short of those Bouches du Rhône, the railway turns to the north, toward Montpellier and

 
‘Arli, dove il Rhodano stagna.’
 

And at Cette ends this little tour from Ocean to Sea, with the wish that he who next travels that way may have as glorious weather, and as agreeable a companion, as the writer of these lines had in 1864.

VI
NORTH DEVON. 6

I.—Exmoor

We were riding up from Lynmouth, on a pair of ragged ponies, Claude Mellot and I, along the gorge of Watersmeet.  And as we went we talked of many things; and especially of some sporting book which we had found at the Lyndale Hotel the night before, and which we had not by any means admired. 7  I do not object to sporting books in general, least of all to one on Exmoor.  No place in England is more worthy of one.  There is no place whose beauties and peculiarities are more likely to be thrown into strong relief by being looked at with a sportsman’s eye.  It is so with all forests and moorlands.  The spirit of Robin Hood and Johnny of Breadislee is theirs.  They are remnants of the home of man’s fierce youth, still consecrated to the genius of animal excitement and savage freedom; after all, not the most ignoble qualities of human nature.  Besides, there is no better method of giving a living picture of a whole country than by taking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing all other observations into harmony with that original key.  Even in merely scientific books this is very possible.  Look, for instance, at Hugh Miller’s ‘Old Red Sandstone,’ ‘The Voyage of the Beagle,’ and Professor Forbes’s work (we had almost said epic poem) on ‘Glaciers.’  Even an agricultural writer, if he have a real insight in him—if he have anything of that secret of the più nel’ uno, ‘the power of discovering the infinite in the finite;’ of seeing, like a poet, trivial phenomena in their true relation to the whole of the great universe into which they are so cunningly fitted; if he has learned to look at all things and men, down to the meanest, as living lessons written with the finger of God; if, in short, he has any true dramatic power: then he may impart to that apparently muddiest of sciences a poetic or a humorous tone, and give the lie to Mephistopheles when he dissuades Faust from farming as an occupation too mean and filthy for a man of genius.  The poetry of agriculture remains as yet, no doubt, unwritten, and the comedy of it also; though its farce-tragedy has been too often extensively enacted in practice—unconsciously to the players.  As for the old ‘pastoral’ school, it only flourished before agriculture really existed—that is, before sound science, hard labour, and economy were necessary—and has been for the last two hundred years simply a dream.  Nevertheless, as signs of what may be done even now by a genial man with so stubborn a subject as ‘turnips, barley, clover, wheat,’ it is worth while to look at old Arthur Young’s books, both travels and treatises; and also at certain very spirited ‘Chronicles of a Clay Farm,’ by Talpa, which teem with humour and wisdom.

In sporting literature—a tenth muse, exclusively indigenous to England—the same observation holds good tenfold.  Some of our most perfect topographical sketches have been the work of sportsmen.  Old Izaak Walton, and his friend Cotton, of Dovedale, whose names will last as long as their rivers, have been followed by a long train of worthy pupils.  White’s ‘History of Selborne;’ Sir Humphry Davy’s ‘Salmonia;’ ‘The Wild Sports of the West;’ Mr. St. John’s charming little works on Highland Shooting; and, above all, Christopher North’s ‘Recreations’—delightful book! to be read and re-read, the tenth time even as the first—an inexhaustible fairy well, springing out of the granite rock of the sturdy Scotch heart, through the tender green turf of a genial boyish old age.  Sporting books, when they are not filled—as they need never be—with low slang, and ugly sketches of ugly characters—who hang on to the skirts of the sporting world, as they would to the skirts of any other world, in default of the sporting one—form an integral and significant, and, it may be, an honourable and useful part, of the English literature of this day; and, therefore, all shallowness, vulgarity, stupidity, or bookmaking in that class, must be as severely attacked as in novels and poems.  We English owe too much to our field sports to allow people to talk nonsense about them.

Claude smiled at some such words of mine that day.  ‘You talk often of the poetry of sport.  I can see nothing in it but animal excitement, and a certain quantity, I suppose, of that animal cunning which the Red Indian possesses in common with the wolf and the cat, and any other beast of prey.  As a fact, the majority of sportsmen are of the most unpoetical type of manhood.’

‘More unpoetical than the average man of business, or man of law, Claude?  Or even than the average preacher?  I believe, on the contrary, that for most of them it is sport which at once keeps alive and satisfies what you would call their æsthetic faculties, and so—smile if you will—helps to make them purer, simpler, more genial men.’

‘Little enough of æsthetic appears either in their conversation or their writing.’

‘Esau is a dumb soul, especially here in England; but he has as deep a heart in him as Jacob, nevertheless, and as tender.  Do you fancy that the gentleman over whose book we were grumbling last night, attached no more to his own simple words than you do?  His account of a stag’s run looks bald enough to you: but to him (unless Diana struck him blind for intruding on her privacy) what a whole poem of memories there must be in those few words,—“Turned down * * Water for a mile, and crossed the forest to Watersmeet, where he was run into after a gallant race.”’

‘A whole poem?’

‘Why not?  How can there be less, if he had eyes to see?’

‘Does he fancy that it is an account of a run to tell us that “Found at * * * * cover, held away at a slapping pace for * * * * Barn, then turned down the * * * Water for a mile, and crossed the Forest; made for * * * Hill, but being headed, went by ** ** woods to D * * * where he was run into after a gallant race of * * * * hours and * * * *miles”?  It is nearly as dull as a history book!’

‘Nay, I never rode with those staghounds: and yet I can fill up his outline for him, wherever the stag was roused.  Do you think that he never marked how the panting cavalcade rose and fell on the huge mile-long waves of that vast heather sea; how one long brown hill after another sunk down, greyer and greyer, behind them, and one long grey hill after another swelled up browner and browner before them; and how the sandstone rattled and flew beneath their feet, as the great horses, like Homer’s of old, “devoured up the plain;” and how they struggled down the hill-side, through bushes and rocks, and broad slipping rattling sheets of screes, and saw beneath them stag and pack galloping down the shallow glittering river-bed, throwing up the shingle, striking out the water in long glistening sheets; and how they too swept after them, down the flat valley, rounding crag and headland, which opened one after another in interminable vista, along the narrow strip of sand and rushes, speckled with stunted, moss-bearded, heather-bedded hawthorns, between the great grim lifeless mountain walls?  Did he feel no pleasant creeping of the flesh that day at the sound of his own horse-hoofs, as they swept through the long ling with a sound as soft as the brushing of a woman’s tresses, and then rang down on the spongy, black, reverberating soil, chipping the honey-laden fragrant heather blossoms, and tossing them out in a rosy shower?  Or, if that were really too slight a thing for the observation of an average sportsman, surely he must recollect the dying away of the hounds’ voices, as the woodland passes engulfed them, whether it were Brendon or at Badger-worthy, or any other place; how they brushed through the narrow forest paths, where the ashes were already golden, while the oaks still kept their sombre green, and the red leaves and berries of the mountain-ash showed bright beneath the dark forest aisles; and how all of a sudden the wild outcry before them seemed to stop and concentrate, thrown back, louder and louder as they rode, off the same echoing crag; till at a sudden turn of the road there stood the stag beneath them in the stream, his back against the black rock with its green cushions of dripping velvet, knee-deep in the clear amber water, the hounds around him, some struggling and swimming in the deep pool, some rolling and tossing and splashing in a mad, half-terrified ring, as he reared into the air on his great haunches, with the sparkling beads running off his red mane, and dropping on his knees, plunged his antlers down among them, with blows which would have each brought certain death with it if the yielding water had not broken the shock.  Do you think that he does not remember the death?  The huge carcass dragged out of the stream, followed by dripping, panting dogs; the blowing of the mort, and the last wild halloo, when the horn-note and the voices rang through the autumn woods, and rolled up the smooth flat mountain sides; and Brendon answered Countisbury, and Countisbury sent it on to Lynmouth hills, till it swept out of the gorge and died away upon the Severn sea?  And then, does he not remember the pause, and the revulsion, and the feeling of sadness and littleness, almost of shame, as he looked up for the first time—one can pardon his not having done so before—and saw where he was, and the beauty of the hill-sides, with the lazy autumn clouds crawling about their tops, and the great sheets of screes, glaciers of stone covering acres and acres of the smooth hill-side, eating far into the woods below, bowing down the oak scrubs with their weight, and the circular sweeps of down, flecked with innumerable dark spots of gorse, each of them guarded where they open into the river chasm by two fortresses of “giant-snouted crags,”—delicate pink and grey sandstone, from which blocks and crumbling boulders have been toppling slowly down for ages, beneath the frost and the whirlwind, and now lie in long downward streams upon the slope, as if the mountain had been weeping tears of stone?  And then, as the last notes of the mort had died away, did not there come over him an awe at the silence of the woods, not broken, but deepened, by the unvarying monotone of the roaring stream beneath, which flashed and glittered, half-hidden in the dark chasm, in clear brown pools reflecting every leaf and twig, in boiling pits and walls of foam, ever changing, and yet for ever the fleeting on past the poor dead reeking stag and the silent hounds lying about on the moss-embroidered stones, their lolling tongues showing like bright crimson sparkles in the deep rich Venetian air of the green sombre shades; while the startled water-ousel, with his white breast, flitted a few yards and stopped to stare from a rock’s point at the strange intruders; and a single stock-dove, out of the bosom of the wood, began calling sadly and softly, with a dreamy peaceful moan?  Did he not see and hear all this, for surely it was there to see and hear?’

‘Not he.  The eye only sees that which it brings within the power of seeing; and all I shall say of him is, that a certain apparition in white leathers was at one period of its appearance dimly conscious of equestrian motion towards a certain brown two-horned phenomenon, and other spotted phenomena, at which he had been taught by habit to make the articulate noises “stag” and “hounds,” among certain grey, and green, and brown phenomena, at which the same habit and the example of his fellows had taught him to say, “Rock, and wood, and mountain,” and perhaps the further noises of “Lovely, splendid, majestic.”’

‘As usual, sir!  You dwellers in Babylon fancy that you have the monopoly of all the intellect, and all the taste, because you earn your livings by talking about pretty things, and painting pretty things: little do you suspect, shut up together in your little literary worlds, and your artistic worlds, how many thousands of us outside barbarians there are who see as clearly, and enjoy as deeply as you do: but hold their tongues about their own feelings, simply because they have never been driven by emptiness of pocket to look round for methods of expressing them.  And, after all—how much of nature can you express?  You confest yourself yesterday baffled by all the magnificence around you.’

‘Yes! to paint it worthily one would require to be a Turner, a Copley Fielding, and a Creswick, all in one.’

‘And did you ever remark how such scenes as this gorge of the “Watersmeet” stir up a feeling of shame, almost of peevishness, before the sense of a mysterious meaning which we ought to understand and cannot?’

He smiled.

‘Our torments do by length of time become our elements; and painful as that sensation is to the earnest artist, he will feel it, I fancy, at last sublime itself into an habitually gentle, reverent, almost melancholy tone of mind, as of a man bearing the burden of an infinite and wonderful message which his own frivolity and laziness hinder him from speaking out.’

‘Then it should beget in him, too, something of merciful indulgence towards the seeming stupidity of those who see, after all, only a very little shallower than he does into the unfathomable depths of nature.’

‘Well, sporting books and sportsmen seem to me, by their very object, not to be worth troubling our heads about.  Out of nothing, comes nothing.  See, my hands are as soft as any lady’s in Belgravia.  I could not, to save my life, lift a hundredweight a foot off the ground; while you have been a wild man of the woods, a leaper of ditches, a rower of races, and a wanton destroyer of all animal life: and yet—’

‘You would hint politely that you are as open as me to all noble, and chivalrous, and truly manly emotions?’

‘What think you?’

‘That you are far worthier in such matters than I, friend.  But do not forget that it may be your intellect, and your profession—in one word, Heaven’s mercy—which have steered you clear of shoals upon which you will find the mass of our class founder.  Woe to the class or the nation which has no manly physical training!  Look at the manners, the morals, the faces of the young men of the shopkeeping classes, if you wish to see the effects of utterly neglecting the physical development of man; 8 of fancying that all the muscular activity he requires under the sun is to be able to stand behind a counter, or sit on a desk-stool without tumbling off.  Be sure, be sure, that ever since the days of the Persians of old, effeminacy, if not twin-sister of cowardice and dishonesty, has always gone hand in hand with them.  To that utter neglect of any exercises which call out fortitude, patience, self-dependence, and daring, I attribute a great deal of the low sensuality, the conceited vulgarity, the want of a high sense of honour, which is increasing just now among the middle classes; and from which the navigator, the engineer, the miner, and the sailor are comparatively free.’

‘And perhaps, too, that similar want of a high sense of honour, which seems, from the religious periodicals, to pervade a large proportion of a certain more venerable profession?’

‘Seriously, Claude, I believe you are not far wrong.  But we are getting on delicate ground there: however I have always found, that of whatever profession he may be—to travestie Shakspeare’s words,—

 
“The man that hath not sporting in his soul,
Is fit for treason’s direst stratagems”—
 

and so forth.’

‘Civil to me!’

‘Oh, you have a sporting soul in you, like hundreds of other Englishmen who never handled rod or gun; or you would not be steering for Exmoor to-day.  If a lad be a genius, you may trust him to find some original means for developing his manly energies, whether in art, agriculture, science, or travels, discovery, and commerce.  But if he be not, as there are a thousand chances to one he will not be, then whatever you teach him, let the two first things be, as they were with the old Persians, “To speak the truth, and to draw the bow.”’

By this time we had reached the stream, just clearing from the last night’s showers.  A long transparent amber shallow, dimpled with fleeting silver rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green-veined snow; a deep dark pool of swirling orange-brown, walled in with heathery rocks, and paved with sandstone slabs and boulders, distorted by the changing refractions of the eddies,—sight delicious to the angler.

I commenced my sport at once, while Claude wandered up the glen to sketch a knoll of crags, on which a half-wild moorland pony, the only living thing in sight, stood staring and snuffing at the intruder, his long mane and tail streaming out wildly against the sky.

I had fished on for some hour or two; Claude had long since disappeared among the hills; I fancied myself miles from any human being, when a voice at my elbow startled me:—

‘A bleak place for fishing this, sir!’

I turned; it was an old grey-whiskered labouring man, with pick and spade on shoulder, who had crept on me unawares beneath the wall of the neighbouring deer-cover.  Keen honest eyes gleamed out from his brown, scarred, weather-beaten face; and as he settled himself against a rock with the deliberate intention of a chat, I commenced by asking after the landlord of those parts, well known and honoured both by sportsman and by farmer.

‘He was gone to Malta—a warmer place that than Exmoor.’

‘What! have you been in Malta?’

Yes, he had been in Malta, and in stranger places yet.  He had been a sailor: he had seen the landing in Egypt, and heard the French cannon thundering vainly from the sand-hills on the English boats.  He had himself helped to lift Abercrombie up the ship’s side to the death-bed of the brave.  He had seen Caraccioli hanging at his own yard-arm, and heard (so he said, I know not how correctly) Lady Hamilton order out the barge herself, and row round the frigate of the murdered man, to glut her eyes with her revenge.  He had seen, too, the ghastly corpse floating upright, when Nelson and the enchantress met their victim, returned from the sea-depths to stare at them, as Banquo’s ghost upon Macbeth.  But she was ‘a mortal fine woman, was Lady Hamilton, though she was a queer one, and cruel kind to the sailors; and many a man she saved from flogging; and one from hanging, too; that was a marine that got a-stealing; for Nelson, though he was kind enough, yet it was a word and a blow with him; and quite right he, sir; for there be such rascals on board ship, that if you ain’t as sharp with them as with wild beastesses, no man’s life, nor the ship’s neither, would be worth a day’s purchase.’

So he, with his simple straightforward notions of right and wrong worth, much maudlin unmerciful indulgence which we hear in these days: and yet not going to the bottom of the matter either, as we shall see in the next war.  But, rambling on, he told me how he had come home, war-worn and crippled, to marry a wife and get tall sons, and lay his bones in his native village; till which time (for death to the aged poor man is a Sabbath, of which he talks freely, calmly, even joyously) ‘he just got his bread, by the squire’s kindness, patching and mending at the stone deer-fences.’

I gave him something to buy tobacco, and watched him as he crawled away, with a sort of stunned surprise.  And he had actually seen Nelson sit by Lady Hamilton!  It was so strange, to have that gay Italian bay, with all its memories,—the orgies of Baiæ, and the unburied wrecks of ancient towns, with the smoking crater far above; and the world-famous Nile-mouths and those great old wars, big with the destinies of the world; and those great old heroes, with their awful deeds for good and evil, all brought so suddenly and livingly before me, up there in the desolate moorland, where the deer, and birds, and heath, and rushes were even as they had been from the beginning.  Like Wordsworth with his Leech-Gatherer (a poem which I, in spite of laughter, must rank among his very highest),—

 
‘While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The old man’s shape, and speech—all troubled me;
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.
. . . and when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.’
 

Just then I heard a rustle, and turning, saw Claude toiling down to me over the hill-side.  He joined me, footsore and weary, but in great excitement; for the first minute or two he could not speak, and at last,—

‘Oh, I have seen such a sight!—but I will tell you how it all was.  After I left you I met a keeper.  He spoke civilly to me—you know my antipathy to game and those who live thereby: but there was a wild, bold, self-helping look about him and his gun alone there in the waste—and after all he was a man and a brother.  Well, we fell into talk, and fraternized; and at last he offered to take me to a neighbouring hill and show me “sixty head of red-deer all together;” and as he spoke he looked quite proud of his words.  “I was lucky,” he said, “to come just then, for the stags had all just got their heads again.”  At which speech I wondered; but was silent, and followed him, I, Claude the Cockney, such a walk as I shall never take again.  Behold these trousers—behold these hands! scratched to pieces by crawling on all-fours through the heather.  But I saw them.’

‘A sight worth many pairs of plaid trousers?’

‘Worth Saint Chrysostom’s seven years’ nakedness on all-fours!  And so I told the fellow, who by some cunning calculations about wind, and sun, and so forth, which he imparted to my uncomprehending ears, brought me suddenly to the top of a little crag, below which, some hundred yards off, the whole herd stood, stags, hinds—but I can’t describe them.  I have not brought away a scrap of sketch, though we watched them full ten minutes undiscovered; and then the stare, and the toss of those antlers, and the rush!  That broke the spell with me; for I had been staring stupidly at them, trying in vain to take in the sight, with the strangest new excitement heaving and boiling up in my throat; and at the sound of their hoofs on the turf I woke, and found the keeper staring, not at them, but at me, who, I verily believe, had something very like a tear in these excitable eyes of mine.’

‘“Ain’t you well, sir?” said he.  “You needn’t be afeard; it’s only at the fall of the year the stags is wicked.”

‘I don’t know what I answered at first; but the fellow understood me when I shook his hand frantically, and told him that I should thank him to the last day of my life, and that I would not have missed it for a thousand pounds.  In part-proof whereof I gave him a sovereign on the spot, which seemed to clear my character in his eyes as much as the crying at the sight of a herd of deer had mystified it.’

6.Fraser’s Magazine, July 1849.
7.Some years after this was written, the very book which was needed appeared, as “The Chase of the Red Deer,” by Mr. Palk Collyns.
8.Written before the Volunteer movement.