The matchlocks, too, are inlaid or the stocks carved.  There is slaughter in every line of our modern guns—­mechanical slaughter.  But were I offered participation in the bloodiest battue ever arranged, or the freedom of an English forest or mountain tract, to go forth at any time untrammelled by attendant, but only to shoot with matchlock, wheel-lock, or cross-bow, my choice would be unhesitating.

There would be pleasure in winding up the lock with the spanner; pleasure in adjusting the priming; or with the matchlock in lighting the match.  To wander out into the brake, to creep from tree to tree so noiselessly that the woodpecker should not cease to tap—­in that there is joy.  The consciousness that everything depends upon your own personal skill, and that you have no second resource if that fails you, gives the real zest to sport.

If the wheel did not knock a spark out quickly; if the priming had not been kept dry or the match not properly blown, or the cross-bow set exactly accurate, then the care of approach would be lost.  You must hold the gun steady, too, while the slow priming ignites the charge.

An imperfect weapon—­yes; but the imperfect weapon would accord with the great oaks, the beech trees full of knot-holes, the mysterious thickets, the tall fern, the silence and the solitude.  The chase would become a real chase:  not, as now, a foregone conclusion.  And there would be time for pondering and dreaming.

Let us be always out of doors among trees and grass, and rain and wind and sun.  There the breeze comes and strikes the cheek and sets it aglow:  the gale increases and the trees creak and roar, but it is only a ruder music.  A calm follows, the sun shines in the sky, and it is the time to sit under an oak, leaning against the bark, while the birds sing and the air is soft and sweet.  By night the stars shine, and there is no fathoming the dark spaces between those brilliant points, nor the thoughts that come as it were between the fixed stars and landmarks of the mind.

Or it is the morning on the hills, when hope is as wide as the world; or it is the evening on the shore.  A red sun sinks, and the foam-tipped waves are crested with crimson; the booming surge breaks, and the spray flies afar, sprinkling the face watching under the pale cliffs.  Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind.  A something that the ancients called divine can be found and felt there still.

THE END