eat goddess-mother Hertha had
laid herself down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapt in
a thin veil of silvery green.

Up, into a vast amphitheatre of sward, whose walls banked out the
narrow sky above. And here, in the focus of the huge ring, an
object appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot,--a
little chapel, ivy-grown, girded with a few yews, and elders, and
grassy graves. A climbing rose over the porch, and iron railings
round the churchyard, told of human care; and from the graveyard
itself burst up one of those noble springs known as winter-bournes
in the chalk ranges, which, awakened in autumn from the abysses to
which it had shrunk during the summer's drought, was hurrying down
upon its six months' course, a broad sheet of oily silver over a
temporary channel of smooth greensward.

The hounds had checked in the woods behind; now they poured down the
hillside, so close together 'that you might have covered them with a
sheet,' straight for the little chapel.

A saddened tone of feeling spread itself through Lancelot's heart.
There were the everlasting hills around, even as they had grown and
grown for countless ages, beneath the still depths of the primeval
chalk ocean, in the milky youth of this great English land. And
here was he, the insect of a day, fox-hunting upon THEM! He felt
ashamed, and more ashamed when the inner voice whispered--'Fox-
hunting is not the shame--thou art the shame. If thou art the
insect of a day, it is thy sin that thou art one.'

And his sadness, foolish as it may seem, grew as he watched a brown
speck fleet rapidly up the opposite hill, and heard a gay view-
halloo burst from the colonel at his side. The chase lost its charm
for him the moment the game was seen. Then vanished that mysterious
delight of pursuing an invisible object, which gives to hunting and
fishing their unutterable and almost spiritual charm; which made
Shakespeare a nightly poacher; Davy and Chantrey the patriarchs of
fly-fishing; by which the twelve-foot rod is transfigured into an
enchanter's wand, potent over the unseen wonders of the water-world,
to 'call up spirits from the vasty deep,' which will really 'come if
you do call for them'--at least if the conjuration be orthodox--and
they there. That spell was broken by the sight of poor wearied pug,
his once gracefully-floating brush all draggled and drooping, as he
toiled up the sheep-paths t