ed by one or two domestics, who seemed immediately attached
to her service, retired from the scene of action, to which Bucklaw, too
much delighted with an opportunity of displaying his woodcraft to care
about man or woman either, paid little attention; but was soon stript to
his doublet, with tucked-up sleeves, and naked arms up to the elbows
in blood and grease, slashing, cutting, hacking, and hewing, with the
precision of Sir Tristrem himself, and wrangling and disputing with all
around him concerning nombles, briskets, flankards, and raven-bones,
then usual terms of the art of hunting, or of butchery, whichever the
reader chooses to call it, which are now probably antiquated.

When Ravenswood, who followed a short pace behind his friend, saw that
the stag had fallen, his temporary ardour for the chase gave way to that
feeling of reluctance which he endured at encountering in his fallen
fortunes the gaze whether of equals or inferiors. He reined up his horse
on the top of a gentle eminence, from which he observed the busy and gay
scene beneath him, and heard the whoops of the huntsmen, gaily mingled
with the cry of the dogs, and the neighing and trampling of the horses.
But these jovial sounds fell sadly on the ear of the ruined nobleman.
The chase, with all its train of excitations, has ever since feudal
times been accounted the almost exclusive privilege of the aristocracy,
and was anciently their chief employment in times of peace. The sense
that he was excluded by his situation from enjoying the silvan sport,
which his rank assigned to him as a special prerogative, and the feeling
that new men were now exercising it over the downs which had been
jealously reserved by his ancestors for their own amusement, while he,
the heir of the domain, was fain to hold himself at a distance from
their party, awakened reflections calculated to depress deeply a mind
like Ravenswood's, which was naturally contemplative and melancholy. His
pride, however, soon shook off this feeling of dejection, and it gave
way to impatience upon finding that his volatile friend Bucklaw seemed
in no hurry to return with his borrowed steed, which Ravenswood, before
leaving the field, wished to see restored to the obliging owner. As he
was about to move towards the group of assembled huntsmen, he was joined
by a horseman, who, like himself, had kept aloof during the fall of the
deer.

This personage seemed stricken in years. He wore a scarlet cloak,