driven toward the house, to be killed
at the feet of the ladies, who stepped down in hoops and furbelows and
dainty shoes to the iron gates between two pepper-box towers where
gorgeous peacocks now strut and sun themselves.

Those were the days when, sorely against his own wish, Archbishop
Abbot, my worthy ancestor, went a-hunting in the park on Sunday at the
command of the king his master, who with the archbishop was a guest of
Lord Zouch. Well for him had it been if he had resisted the royal will,
for, as it befell, the arrow from his crossbow, glancing from a tree,
struck one of the keepers and killed him then and there. The poor
archbishop, it is said, never smiled again, and his sad, tender face in
Vandyke's noble picture looks down on me from the wall as I write and
bears out the truth of the story. Often and often when we children were
playing in the park did we wander about, trying to settle from which
tree the arrow glanced, conjuring up before our eyes the whole
scene--the king's anger and the archbishop's despair at the
catastrophe--and feeling the while a proud personal interest in it all.
Ah, what good days those were, roaming about knee-deep in heather,
catching the rare moths, chasing the squirrels that whisked up the fir
stems and mocked us from their high perch, searching the hollow trees
for woodpeckers' nests, eating the beech-nuts or pricking our fingers as
we tried to open the husks of the Spanish chestnuts that grew by the
lake! From among the bulrushes the coots sailed out at our approach, and
the tiny dabchick dived so deep that we thought, "This time she _must_
be drowned," when, lo and behold! she would appear twenty yards off, a
little black ball with a yellow bill, only to take breath and plunge
again. Sometimes in a hard winter we would hear high in the sky the cry
of a weird pack of hounds. Nearer and nearer drew that unearthly music,
till we held our breath in a kind of delightful terror, and then above
our heads appeared a flock of wild swans on the search for water; and
down they dropped, like white cannon-balls, into the lake, sending a
mass of spray into the air and shivering the smooth black surface of the
water into a thousand ripples that circled away and lapped against the
banks in mimic waves.

But I think my most exquisite moment of happiness was one spring day
when I saw close by me a little fox-cub--a furry darling, about as big
as a four-months'-old kitten, with black stripe