mile off I heard his howl myself, and the confused and savage hubbub, as
the hounds front and rear, assailed him.

"Hampered although he was, he battled it out fiercely--ay, heroically--
as six of our best hounds maimed for life, and one slain outright,
testified.

"Heavens! how the fat man scrambled across the fence! he reached the
spot, and, far too much excited to reload his piece and quietly blow out
the fierce brute's brains, fell to belaboring him about the head with
his gun-stock, shouting the while and yelling; so that the din of his
tongue, mixed with the snarls and long howls of the mangled savage, and
the fierce baying of the dogs, fairly alarmed me, as I said before, at a
mile's distance.

"As it chanced, Timothy was on the road close by, with Peacock; I caught
sight of him, mounted, and spurred on fiercely to the rescue; but when I
reached the hill's brow, all was over. Tom, puffing and panting like a
grampus in shoal water, covered--garments and face and hands--with
lupine gore, had finished his huge enemy, after he had destroyed his
gun, with what he called a stick, but what you and I, Frank, should term
a fair-sized tree; and with his foot upon the brindled monster's neck
was quaffing copious rapture from the neck of a quart bottle--once full,
but now well nigh exhausted--of his appropriate and cherished beverage.*
[*The facts and incidents of the lame wolf's death are strictly true,
although they were not witnessed by the writer.] Thus fell the last wolf
on the Hills of Warwick!

"There, I have finished my yarn, and in good time," cried Harry, "for
here we are at the bridge, and in five minutes more we shall be at old
Tom's door."

"A right good yarn!" said Forester; "and right well spun, upon my word."

"But is it a yarn?" asked A---, "or is it intended to be the truth?"

"Oh! the truth," laughed Frank, "the truth, as much as Archer can tell
the truth; embellished, you understand, embellished!"

"The truth, strictly," answered Harry, quietly--"the truth not
embellished. When I tell personal adventures, I am not in the habit of
decorating them with falsehood."

"I had no idea," responded the Commodore, "that there had been any
wolves here so recently."

"There are wolves here now," said Archer, "though they are scarce and
wary. It was but last year that I rode down over the back-bone of the
mountain, on the Pompton road, in the nighttime, and that on the third
of July, and one fellow follo