Lucy blushed, disclaimed any inference respecting her own choice being drawn from her selection of a song, and readily laid aside her instrument at her father’s request that she would attend him in his walk.

A large and well-wooded park, or rather chase, stretched along the hill behind the castle, which, occupying, as we have noticed, a pass ascending from the plain, seemed built in its very gorge to defend the forest ground which arose behind it in shaggy majesty.  Into this romantic region the father and daughter proceeded, arm in arm, by a noble avenue overarched by embowering elms, beneath which groups of the fallow-deer were seen to stray in distant perspective.  As they paced slowly on, admiring the different points of view, for which Sir William Ashton, notwithstanding the nature of his usual avocations, had considerable taste and feeling, they were overtaken by the forester, or park-keeper, who, intent on silvan sport, was proceeding with his cross-bow over his arm, and a hound led in leash by his boy, into the interior of the wood.

“Going to shoot us a piece of venison, Norman?” said his master, as he returned the woodsman’s salutation.

“Saul, your honour, and that I am.  Will it please you to see the sport?”

“Oh no,” said his lordship, after looking at his daughter, whose colour fled at the idea of seeing the deer shot, although, had her father expressed his wish that they should accompany Norman, it was probable she would not even have hinted her reluctance.

The forester shrugged his shoulders.  “It was a disheartening thing,” he said, “when none of the gentles came down to see the sport.  He hoped Captain Sholto would be soon hame, or he might shut up his shop entirely; for Mr. Harry was kept sae close wi’ his Latin nonsense that, though his will was very gude to be in the wood from morning till night, there would be a hopeful lad lost, and no making a man of him.  It was not so, he had heard, in Lord Ravenswood’s time:  when a buck was to be killed, man and mother’s son ran to see; and when the deer fell, the knife was always presented to the knight, and he never gave less than a dollar for the compliment.  And there was Edgar Ravenswood—­Master of Ravenswood that is now—­when he goes up to the wood—­there hasna been a better hunter since Tristrem’s time—­when Sir Edgar hauds out, down goes the deer, faith.  But we hae lost a’ sense of woodcraft on this side of the hill.”

There was much in this harangue highly displeasing to the Lord Keeper’s feelings; he could not help observing that his menial despised him almost avowedly for not possessing that taste for sport which in those times was deemed the natural and indispensable attribute of a real gentleman.  But the master of the game is, in all country houses, a man of great importance, and entitled to use considerable freedom of speech.  Sir William, therefore, only smiled and replied, “He had something else to think