Here at last, then, for a live certainty!  But how strange it all seems, resting safely in our easy slippers, to recall some of the far-off scenes so lately present to us!  Yesterday was it, or a few weeks ago, that this “excellent canopy,” our modest roof, dwelt three thousand miles away to the westward of us?  At this moment stowed away in a snuggery called our own; and then—­how brief a period it seems! what a small parenthesis in time—­putting another man’s latch-key into another man’s door, night after night, in a London fog, and feeling for the unfamiliar aperture with all the sensation of an innocent housebreaker!  Muffled here in the oldest of dressing-gowns, that never lifted its blessed arms ten rods from the spot where it was born; and only a few weeks ago lolling out of C.R.’s college-window at Oxford, counting the deer, as they nibbled the grass, and grouped themselves into beautiful pictures on the sward of ancient Magdalen!

As we look into the red fire in the grate, we think of the scarlet coats we saw not long ago in Stratford,—­when E.F., kindest of men and merriest of hosts, took us to the “meet.”  We gaze round the field again, and enjoy the enlivening scene.  White-haired and tall, our kind-hearted friend walks his glossy mare up and down the turf.  His stalwart sons, with sport imbrowned, proud of their sire, call our attention to the sparkle in the old man’s eye.  We are mounted on a fiery little animal, and are half-frightened at the thought of what she may do with us when the chase is high.  Confident that a roll is inevitable, and that, with a dislocated neck, enjoyment would be out of the question, we pull bridle, and carefully dismount, hoping not to attract attention.  Whereat all our jolly English cousins beg to inquire, “What’s the row?” We whisper to the red-coated brave prancing near us, that “we have changed our mind, and will not follow the hunt to-day,—­another time we shall be most happy,—­just now we are not quite up to the mark,—­next week we shall be all right again,” etc., etc.  One of the lithe hounds, who seems to have steel springs in his hind legs, looks contemptuously at the American stranger, and turns up his long nose like a moral insinuation.  Off they fly! we watch the beautiful cavalcade bound over the brook and sweep away into the woodland passes.  Then we saunter down by the Avon, and dream away the daylight in endless visions of long ago, when sweet Will and his merry comrades moved about these pleasant haunts.  Returning to the hall, we find we have walked ten miles over the breezy country, and knew it not,—­so pleasant is the fragrant turf that has been often pressed by the feet of Nature’s best-beloved high-priest!  Round the mahogany tree that night we hear the hunters tell the glories of their sport,—­how their horses, like Homer’s steeds,

  “Devoured up the plain”;

and we can hear now, in imagination, the voices of the deep-mouthed hounds rising and swelling among the Warwick glens.