“Hush,” quoth I, “or they’ll be off like feathers in a whirlwind, or shadows of the lights and darks of nothingness lost in a poet’s nightmare.”

“A sumph ye mean,” answered Jammie.

“Hush, there they are gazing in the water, and falling in love with their own reflected beauty.”

“Mark the brindled tan buck,” whispered one keeper to the other.  They fired together, and both struck him plump in his eye of fire; mine seemed to drop sparks with sympathy:  he bounded up ten feet high—­he shrieked, and fell stone dead; Gods, what a shriek it was; I fancy even now I have that shriek and its hill-echo chained to the tympanum of my ear, like the shriek of the shipwrecked hanging over the sea—­heavens! it was a pity to slay a king I thought, as I saw him fall in his pride and strength; but by some irresistible instinct, my own gun, pulled, I don’t know how, and went off, and wounded another in the hip, and he plunged like mad into the river, to staunch his wounds and defend himself against the dogs.  Ay, there he is keeping them at bay, and scorning to yield an inch backward; and now the keeper steals in behind him and lets him down by ham-stringing him:  but when he found his favourite dog back-broken by the buck, why he cursed the deer, and begged our pardon for swearing; and now he cuts a slashing gash from shoulder to chop to let out the blood; and there lay they, dead, in silvan beauty, like two angels which might have been resting on the pole, and spirit-stricken into ice before they had power to flee away.

But we must away to Sir Reynard’s hall, and unsough him; this we can do with less sorrowful feelings than killing a deer, which indeed, is like taking the life of a brother or a sister; but as to a fox, there is an old clow-jewdaism about him, that makes me feel like passing Petticoat-lane or Monmouth-street, or that sink of iniquity, Holy-well-street.  O, the cunning, side-walking, side-long-glancing, corner-peeping, hang-dog-looking, stolen-goods-receiving knave; “Christian dog” can hold no sympathy with thee, so have at thee.  Ah, here is his hold, a perfect Waterloo of bones.

“The banes o’ my bonnie Toop, a prayer of vengeance for that; an’ Sandy Scott’s twa-yir-auld gimmer, marterdum for that.”  “An’ my braxsied wether,” quoth a forester; “the rack for that, and finally the auld spay-wife’s bantam cock, eyes and tongue cut out and set adrift again, for that.”  Now we set to work to clear his hole for “rough Toby” (a long-backed, short-legged, wire-haired terrier of Dandy Dinmont’s breed) to enter; in he went like red-hot fire, and “ready to nose the vary deevil himsel sud he meet him,” as Jammie Hogg said; and to see the chattering anxiety of the red-coated monkey, as he sat at the mouth of the fox-hole, on his shaggy, grizzle-grey shadow of a horse, like a mounted guardsman in the hole yonder at St. James’s; it truly would have made a “pudding creep” with laughter—­“Reek, reek, reeking into th’ hole after Toby, with