e best part of half an hour, till the report of a
distant gunshot, ringing with almost innumerable reverberations along
the woodland shores, announced to us that our companions had already got
into their work.

"Here goes," cried Harry, springing to his feet at once, and grasping
his good gun; "here goes--they have got into the long hollow, Tom, and
by the time we've crossed the ridge, and got upon our ground, they'll be
abreast of us."

"Hold on! hold on!" Tom bellowed, "you are the darndest critter, when
you do git goin--now hold on, do--I wants some rum, and Forester here
looks a kind of white about the gills, his what-d'ye-call, cheeroot, has
made him sick, I reckon!"

Of course, with such an exhortation in our ears as this, it was
impossible to do otherwise than wet our whistles with one drop of the
old Ferintosh; and then, Tom having once again recovered his good humor,
away we went, and "clombe the high hill," though we "swam not the deep
river," as merrily as ever sportsman did, from the days of Arbalast and
Longbow, down to these times of Westley Richards' caps and Eley's wire
cartridges.

A tramp of fifteen minutes through some scrubby brushwood, brought us to
the base of a steep stony ridge covered with tall and thrifty hickories
and a few oaks and maples intermixed, rising so steeply from the shore
that it was necessary not only to strain every nerve of the leg, but to
swing our bodies up from tree to tree, by dint of hand. It was indeed a
hard and heavy tug; and I had pretty tough work, what between the
exertion of the ascent, and the incessant fits of laughter into which I
was thrown by the grotesquely agile movements of fat Tom; who, grunting,
panting, sputtering, and launching forth from time to time the strangest
and most blasphemously horrid oaths, contrived to make way to the summit
faster than either of us--crashing through the dense underwood of
juniper and sumac, uprooting the oak saplings as he swung from this to
that, and spurning down huge stones upon us, as we followed at a
cautious distance. When we at last crowned the ridge, we found him, just
as Harry had predicted, stretched in a half recumbent attitude, leaning
against a huge gray stone, with his fur cap and double-barrel lying upon
the withered leaves beside him, puffing, as Archer told him, to his
mighty indignation, like a great grampus in shoal water.

After a little rest, however, Falstaff revived, though not before he had
imbib