l times where to find a hare, even
if he knew not one single thing else but the way to his mouth, cannot be
called an ignorant man--is probably a better-informed man in the long
run than the friend on his right, discoursing about the Turks, the
Greeks, the Portugals, and all that sort of thing, giving himself the
lie on every arrival of his daily paper. We never yet knew an old
courser (him of the Sporting Annals included), who was not a man both of
abilities and virtues. But where were we?--at the Trysting-hill
Farmhouse, jocularly called Hunger-them-Out.

Line is formed, and with measured steps we march towards the hills--for
we ourselves are the schoolboy, bold, bright, and blooming as the
rose--fleet of foot almost as the very antelope--Oh! now, alas! dim and
withered as a stalk from which winter has swept all the blossoms--slow
as the sloth along the ground--spindle-shanked as a lean and slippered
pantaloon!

"O heaven! that from our bright and shining years
Age would but take the things youth heeded not!"

An old shepherd meets us on the long sloping rushy ascent to the
hills--and putting his brown withered finger to his gnostic nose,
intimates that she is in her old form behind the dyke--and the noble
dumb animals, with pricked-up ears and brandished tail, are aware that
her hour is come. Plash, plash, through the marsh, and then on the dry
furze beyond, you see her large dark-brown eyes--Soho, soho,
soho--Halloo, halloo, halloo--for a moment the seemingly horned creature
appears to dally with the danger, and to linger ere she lays her lugs on
her shoulder, and away, like thoughts pursuing thoughts--away fly hare
and hounds towards the mountain.

Stand all still for a minute--for not a bush the height of our knee to
break our view--and is not that brattling burst up the brae "beautiful
exceedingly," and sufficient to chain in admiration the beatings of the
rudest gazer's heart? Yes; of all beautiful sights--none more, none so
much so, as the miraculous motion of a four-footed wild animal, changed
at once, from a seeming inert sod or stone, into flight fleet as that of
the falcon's wing! Instinct against instinct! fear and ferocity in one
flight! Pursuers and pursued bound together, in every turning and
twisting of their career, by the operation of two headlong passions! Now
they are all three upon her--and she dies! No! glancing aside, like a
bullet from a wall, she bounds almost at a right angle from