“Have you any children, Mr. B—–?”

“Yes, five; but none like this.”

“My little girl is greatly indebted to you for your kindness.”

“She’s welcome, or she would not get it.  You are strangers; but I like you all.  You look kind, and I would like to know more about you.”

Moodie shook hands with the old hunter, and assured him that we should always be glad to see him.  After this invitation, Brian became a frequent guest.  He would sit and listen with delight to Moodie while he described to him elephant-hunting at the Cape; grasping his rifle in a determined manner, and whistling an encouraging air to his dogs.  I asked him one evening what made him so fond of hunting.

“’Tis the excitement,” he said; “it drowns thought, and I love to be alone.  I am sorry for the creatures, too, for they are free and happy; yet I am led by an instinct I cannot restrain to kill them.  Sometimes the sight of their dying agonies recalls painful feelings; and then I lay aside the gun, and do not hunt for days.  But ’tis fine to be alone with God in the great woods—­to watch the sunbeams stealing through the thick branches, the blue sky breaking in upon you in patches, and to know that all is bright and shiny above you, in spite of the gloom that surrounds you.”

After a long pause, he continued, with much solemn feeling in his look and tone—­

“I lived a life of folly for years, for I was respectably born and educated, and had seen something of the world, perhaps more than was good, before I left home for the woods; and from the teaching I had received from kind relatives and parents I should have known how to have conducted myself better.  But, madam, if we associate long with the depraved and ignorant, we learn to become even worse than they are.  I felt deeply my degradation—­felt that I had become the slave to low vice; and in order to emancipate myself from the hateful tyranny of evil passions, I did a very rash and foolish thing.  I need not mention the manner in which I transgressed God’s holy laws; all the neighbours know it, and must have told you long ago.  I could have borne reproof, but they turned my sorrow into indecent jests, and, unable to bear their coarse ridicule, I made companions of my dogs and gun, and went forth into the wilderness.  Hunting became a habit.  I could no longer live without it, and it supplies the stimulant which I lost when I renounced the cursed whiskey bottle.

“I remember the first hunting excursion I took alone in the forest.  How sad and gloomy I felt!  I thought that there was no creature in the world so miserable as myself.  I was tired and hungry, and I sat down upon a fallen tree to rest.  All was still as death around me, and I was fast sinking to sleep, when my attention was aroused by a long, wild cry.  My dog, for I had not Chance then, and he’s no hunter, pricked up his ears, but instead of answering with a bark of defiance, he crouched