“What in the world is the reason you won’t stand still!” he exclaimed, rising and seizing the pony by the bit.  The only answer Pete made was a snort of unequivocal dissatisfaction.  “Plague take your little hide of you!  I should have killed that fellow to a certainty, if you hadn’t played the fool!” continued he, still addressing his pony while he proceeded to load his gun.  When ready for another fire, he mounted again, in quite an ill humour, convinced that all chance of killing a deer was effectually over for the present, when, to his utter astonishment, he beheld the deer he had fired at lying dead before him, and but a few paces distant.  With feelings of unmixed delight he galloped to where it lay, and springing to the earth, one moment he whirled round his hat in exultation, and the next caressed Pete, who evinced some repugnance to approach the weltering victim, and snuffed the scent of blood with any other sensation than that of pleasure.  Joe discovered that no less than a dozen balls had penetrated the doe’s side, (for such it was,) which sufficiently accounted for its immediate and quiet death, that had so effectually deceived him into the belief that his discharge had been harmless.  He now blew his horn, which was answered by a blast from Glenn, who soon came up to announce his own success in bringing down the largest buck in the party, and to congratulate his man on his truly remarkable achievement.

An hour was consumed in preparing the deer to be conveyed to the house, and by the time they were safely deposited in our hero’s diminutive castle, and the hunters ready to issue forth in quest of more sport, the day was far advanced, and a slight haziness of the atmosphere dimmed in a great measure the lustre of the descending sun.

Animated with their excellent success, they anticipated much more sport, inasmuch as neither themselves nor the hounds (which hitherto were not required to do farther service than to watch one of the deer while the men were engaged with the other) were in the slightest degree fatigued.  The hours flew past unnoticed, while the young men proceeded gayly outward from the river in quest of new adventures.

Glenn and his man rode far beyond the scene of their late success without discovering any new object to gratify their undiminished zest for the chase.  It seemed that the deer which had escaped had actually given intelligence to the rest of the arrival of a deadly foe in the vicinity, for not one could now be seen in riding several miles.  The sun was sinking low and dim in the west, and Glenn was on the eve of turning homeward, when, on emerging from the flat prairie to a slight eminence that he had marked as boundary of his excursion, he beheld at no great distance an enormous mound, of pyramidical shape, which, from its isolated condition, he could not believe to be the formation of nature.  Curious to inspect what he supposed to be a stupendous specimen of the