, and waving like swaying banners as they
tossed their heads and listened.[*]

[*] Let me here take leave to beg pardon of the gallant
Highland stags for comparing them one instant with the
shabby, miserable-looking wretches that travesty them in
Richmond Park. After seeing these latter scrubby, meager
apologies for deer, one wonders why something better cannot
be turned loose there. A hunting-mare I know well
nevertheless flattered them thus by racing them through the
park: when in harness herself, to her own great disgust.

In an instant the hunter pricked his ears, snuffed the air, and twitched
with passionate impatience at his bit; another instant and he had got
his head, and, launching into a sweeping gallop, rushed down the glade.

Cecil sprang forward from his lazy rest, and seized the ribbons that in
one instant had cut his companion's gloves to stripes.

"Sit still," he said calmly, but under his breath. "He had been always
ridden with the Buckhounds; he will race the deer as sure as we live!"

Race the deer he did.

Startled, and fresh for their favorite nightly wandering, the stags were
off like the wind at the noise of alarm, and the horses tore after them;
no skill, no strength, no science could avail to pull them in; they
had taken their bits between their teeth, and the devil that was in
Maraschino lent the contagion of sympathy to the young carriage mare,
who had never gone at such a pace since she had been first put in her
break.

Neither Cecil's hands nor any other force could stop them now; on they
went, hunting as straight in line as though staghounds streamed in front
of them, and no phaeton rocked and swayed in a dead and dragging weight
behind them. In a moment he gauged the closeness and the vastness of
the peril; there was nothing for it but to trust to chance, to keep
his grasp on the reins to the last, and to watch for the first sign of
exhaustion. Long ere that should be given death might have come to them
both; but there was a gay excitation in that headlong rush through the
summer night; there was a champagne-draught of mirth and mischief in
that dash through the starlit woodland; there was a reckless, breathless
pleasure in that neck-or-nothing moonlight chase!

Yet danger was so near with every oscillation; the deer were trooping
in fast flight, now clear in the moonlight, now lost in the shadow,
bounding with their lightning grace over swa