A moment listened to the cry
   That thickened as the chase drew nigh,
   Then, as the headmost foes appeared,
   With one brave bound, the copse he cleared.

At the last line Uncle Henry flung his arm out wide, and the child felt as though the deer had made his great leap there, before her eyes.

“I’ve seen ’em jump just like that,” broke in Uncle Henry.  “A two-three-hundred-pound stag go up over a four-foot fence just like a piece of thistledown in the wind.”

“Uncle Henry,” asked Elizabeth Ann, “what is a copse?”

“I don’t know,” said Uncle Henry indifferently.  “Something in the woods, must be.  Underbrush most likely.  You can always tell words you don’t know by the sense of the whole thing.  Go on.”

   And stretching forward, free and far,

The child’s voice took up the chant again.  She read faster and faster as it got more exciting.  Uncle Henry joined in on

   For, jaded now and spent with toil,
   Embossed with foam and dark with soil,
   While every gasp with sobs he drew,
   The laboring stag strained full in view.

The little girl’s heart beat fast.  She fled along through the next lines, stumbling desperately over the hard words but seeing the headlong chase through them clearly as through tree-trunks in a forest.  Uncle Henry broke in in a triumphant shout: 

   The wily quarry shunned the shock
   And turned him from the opposing rock;
   Then dashing down a darksome glen,
   Soon lost to hound and hunter’s ken,
   In the deep Trossach’s wildest nook
   His solitary refuge took.

“Oh my!” cried Elizabeth Ann, laying down the book.  “He got away, didn’t he?  I was so afraid he wouldn’t!”

“I can just hear those dogs yelping, can’t you?” said Uncle Henry.

   Yelled on the view the opening pack.

“Sometimes you hear ’em that way up on the slope of Hemlock Mountain back of us, when they get to running a deer.”

“What say we have some pop-corn!” suggested Aunt Abigail.  “Betsy, don’t you want to pop us some?”

“I never did,” said the little girl, but in a less doubtful tone than she had ever used with that phrase so familiar to her.  A dim notion was growing up in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was no proof that she couldn’t.

“I’ll show you,” said Uncle Henry.  He reached down a couple of ears from a big yellow cluster hanging on the wall, and he and Betsy shelled them into the popper, popped it full of snowy kernels, buttered it, salted it, and took it back to the table.

It was just as she was eating her first ambrosial mouthful that the door opened and a fur-capped head was thrust in.  A man’s voice said:  “Evenin’, folks.  No, I can’t stay.  I was down at the village just now, and thought I’d ask for any mail down our way.”  He tossed a newspaper and a letter on the table and was gone.