Henry William Herbert

“ At the sound of the guns a dozen more rose hard by, and fluttering on in rapid zig-zags, dropped once again within a hundred yards--the meadow was alive with them.
"Did you ever see snipe here before, Tom? asked Harry, as he loaded.
"Never in all my life--but it's full now--load up! load up! for heaven's sake!"
"No hurry, Tom! Tom--steady! the birds are tame and lie like stones. We can get thirty or forty here, I know, if you'll be steady only--but if we go in with these four dogs, we shall lose all. Here comes Tim with the couples, and we'll take up all but two!" ”

“ Scarce had the first yell echoed through the forest before the pattering of many feet might be heard, mingled with the rustling of the matted boughs throughout the covert--and as the beaters came on, a whole host of rabbits, with no less than seven foxes, two of them gray, came scampering through our line in mortal terror; but on they went unharmed, for strict had been the orders that no shot should be fired, save at the lawful objects of the chase. Just at this moment I saw Garry, who stood a hundred feet above me on the hill, commanding the whole basin of the swamp, bring up his rifle. ”

“ I know my place, depend on it," cried Archer; "but what to do with the rest of you!--there's the rub!"
"Not a bit of it," cried Tom--"here, Yorkshire--Ducklegs--here, what's your name--get away you with those big dogs--atwixt the swamp-hole, and the brush there by the fence, and look out that you mark every bird to an inch! You, Mr. Forester, go in there, under that butter-nut; you'll find a blind track there, right through the brush--keep that 'twixt Tim and Mr. Archer; and keep your eyes skinned, do! there'll be a cock up before you're ten yards in. ”

“ Hang it! there goes a shot--the squire has fired at him, as he tried the earths! Now, if he have but missed him, and Pan, the god of hunters, send it so, he has no chance but to try the open.
By Jove he has! he must have missed! for Bonny Belle and Blossom are raving half a mile this side of him already. And now Tom sees him--how quietly he steals up to the fence. There! he has fired! and all our sport is up! No! no! he waves his hat and points this way! Can he have missed? No! he has got a fox!--he lifts it out by the brush--there must have been two, then, on foot together. ”

“ The next moment the keen short hunting knife, without which Archer never takes the field, had severed at a single stroke the weasand of the gallant brute; the black blood streamed out on the smoking hoar-frost, the full eyes glazed, and, after one sharp fluttering struggle, the life departed from those graceful limbs, which had been but a few short instants previous so full of glorious energy--of fiery vigor.
"Well, that's the strangest thing I ever heard of, let alone seeing," exclaimed Archer, "fancy a buck like that lying in such a mere fringe of coppice, and so near to the road-side, too! ”

“ Will he be in time, then, for the afternoon's shooting?"
"Why, certainly he will," returned Archer. "The wind has been fair up the river all day long, though it has been but light; and the Ianthe will run up before it like a race-horse. I should not be much surprised if he were here to breakfast." "And that we may be up in time for him, if perchance he should let us to bed forthwith," said Frank with a heavy yawn.
"I am content," answered Harry, finishing his cup of coffee, and flinging the stump of his cheroot into the fire. "Good-night! Timothy will call you in the morning." ”

“ Carefully, eagerly, I gazed out to mark the wary bird; but the discharge of Harry's piece assured me, as I thought, that further watch was needless; and stupidly enough I dropped the muzzle of my gun.
Just at the self-same point of time--"Mark! mark, Frank!" shouted Archer, "mark! there are a brace of them!"--and as he spoke, gliding with speed scarcely inferior to a bullet's flight upon their balanced pinions, the noble birds swept past me, so close that I could have struck them with a riding whip. ”

“ I love those hills of Warwick--many a glorious day have I passed in their green recesses; many a wild tale have I heard of sylvan sport and forest warfare, and many, too, of patriot partisanship in the old revolutionary days--the days that tried men's souls--while sitting at my noontide meal by the secluded wellhead, under the canopy of some primeval oak, with implements of woodland sport, rifle or shot-gun by my side, and well-broke setter or stanch hound recumbent at my feet. ”

“ No longer did I wonder at what I had before deemed Harry Archer's strange hallucination; Tom Draw is a decided genius--rough as a pine knot in his native woods--but full of mirth, of shrewdness, of keen mother wit, of hard horse sense, and last, not least, of the most genuine milk of human kindness. He is a rough block; but, as Harry says, there is solid timber under the uncouth bark enough to make five hundred men, as men go now-a-days in cities! ”

“ During all this time, amidst all the kicking of tussocks, threshing of bog-grass, and banging of guns, and, worst of all, bouncing up of fresh birds, from the instant when they dropped at the first shot, neither one of Harry's dogs, nor Tom's little Dash, had budged from their down charge. Now, however, they got up quickly, and soon retrieved all the dead birds. "Now, then, we will divide into two parties," said Harry. "Frank, you go with Tom; and you come with me, Commodore. It will never do to have you two jealous fellows together, you wont kill a bird all day," he added, in a lower voice. ”

“ Ridge after ridge the mountain sloped down from our feet into a vast rich basin ten miles at least in breadth, by thirty, if not more, in length, girdled on every side by mountains--the whole diversified with wood and water, meadow, and pasture-land, and corn-field--studded with small white villages--with more than one bright lakelet glittering like beaten gold in the declining sun, and several isolated hills standing up boldly from the vale! ”

“ But Jem was in his place, and in another moment a long whoop came ringing down the glen, and the shrill yelping rally of the hounds as they all opened on a view together! Fiercer and wilder grew the hubbub! And now the eager watcher might hear the brushwood torn in all directions by the impetuous passage of the wild deer and his inveterate pursuers.
"Now, then, it is old Tom's chance, or ours," he thought, "for he will not try Forester again, I warrant him, and we are all down wind of him-- so he can't judge of our whereabouts." ”

“ In the middle of the high-tilled and fertile cornfield you come upon some sudden hollow, tangled with brake and bush, which hedge in some small pool where float the brilliant cups and smooth leaves of the water lily, and whence, on your approach, up springs the blue-winged teal or gorgeous wood-duck. Then the long sweeping woodlands, embracing in themselves every variety of ground, deep marshy swamp, and fertile level thick-set with giant timber, and sandy barrens with their scrubby undergrowth, and difficult rocky steeps ”

“ And shading their eyes from the level sunbeams, the three stood gazing steadily after the rapid bevy. They cross the pasture, skim very low over the brush fence of the cornfield--they disappear behind it they are down! no! no! not yet--they are just skirting the summit of the topped maize stalks--now they are down indeed, just by that old ruined hovel, where the cat-briers and sumac have overspread its cellar and foundation with thick underwood. And all the while the sturdy dogs are crouching at their feet unmoving.
"Will you not follow those, Harry?" ”

“ Scarce had Fat Tom obeyed his imperative solicitations, and scarce had Tim taken hold of the ribbands which Harry relinquished the moment he got the rifle into his hands, before a most extraordinary hubbub arose in the little skirt of coppice to our left; the spaniels quested for a second's space at the utmost, when a tremendous crash of the branches arose, and both the setters gave tongue furiously with a quick savage yell. ”

“ Chase feels the hot scent steaming up under his very nostril; feels it in every nerve, and quivers with anxiety to dash on his prey, even while perfectly restrained and steady. Shot, on the contrary, though a few minutes since he too was drawing, knows nothing of himself, perceives no indication of the game's near presence, although improved by discipline, his instinct tells him that his mate has found them. ”

“ Off we went then; but what boots it to repeat a thrice told tale; suffice it, that the dogs worked as well as dogs can work; that birds were plentiful, and lying good; that we fagged hard, and shot on the whole passably, so that by sunset we had exceeded Harry's forty brace by fifteen birds, and got beside nine couple and a half of woodcock; which we found, most unexpectedly, basking themselves in the open meadow, along the grassy banks of a small rill, without a bush or tree within five hundred yards of them. ”

“ There, down a wild looking glen, on the left hand, comes brawling, over stump and stone, a tributary streamlet, by the side of which a rough track, made by the charcoal burners and the iron miners, intersects the main road; and up this miserable looking path, for it was little more, Harry wheeled at full trot. "Now for twelve miles of mountain, the roughest road and wildest country you ever saw crossed in a phaeton, good master Frank." ”

“ It was indeed a hard and heavy tug; and I had pretty tough work, what between the exertion of the ascent, and the incessant fits of laughter into which I was thrown by the grotesquely agile movements of fat Tom; who, grunting, panting, sputtering, and launching forth from time to time the strangest and most blasphemously horrid oaths, contrived to make way to the summit faster than either of us--crashing through the dense underwood of juniper and sumac, uprooting the oak saplings as he swung from this to that, and spurning down huge stones upon us, as we followed at a cautious distance. ”

“ An English stage coachman would have stared aghast at the steep zigzags up the hills, the awkward turns on the descents, the sudden pitches, with now an unsafe bridge, and now a stony ford at the bottom; but through all this, the delicate quick finger, keen eye, and cool head of Harry, assisted by the rare mouths of his exquisitely bitted cattle, piloted us at the rate of full ten miles the hour; the scenery, through which the wild track ran, being entirely of the most wild and savage character of woodland ”

“ Here you have been three days about this bag, hard all; and when it's done, it is not half as good a one as you can buy at Cooper's for a dollar, with all this new-fangled machinery of loops and buttons, and I don't know what."
"And you, Master Frank," retorted Harry, nothing daunted, "to be a good shot and a good sportsman--which, with some few exceptions, I must confess you are--are the most culpably and wilfully careless about your appointments I ever met. I don't call a man half a sportsman, who has not every thing he wants at hand for an emergency, at half a minute's notice. ”

“ No marble statue could stand more silently or still than Harry and his favorite gray, who, with erected ears and watchful eye, trembling a little with excitement, seemed to know what he was about, and to enjoy it no less keenly than his rider. Tom and the Commodore, quickening their pace as they got out of ear-shot, retraced their steps quite back to the turnpike road, along which Harry saw them gallop furiously, in a few minutes, and turn up, half a mile off, toward the further gulley--he saw no more, however ”

“ Pitching my gun up to my shoulder, both barrels loaded with Eley's red wire cartridge No. 6, I gave him a snap shot, and had the satisfaction of seeing him keeled well over, not wing-tipped or leg-broken, but fairly riddled by the concentrated charge of something within thirty yards. Turning as quick as light, I caught a fleet sight of the other, which by a rapid zig-zag was now flying full across my front, certainly over forty-five yards distant, among a growth of thick-set saplings--the hardest shot, in my opinion, that can be selected to test a quick and steady sportsman. ”

“ But this was not all, for at every ten or twenty paces was a dense tuft of willow bushes, growing for the most part upon the higher knolls where it was dry and sunny, their roots heaped round with drift wood, from the decay of which had shot up a dense tangled growth of cat-briers. In these the birds were lying, all but some five or six which had run out to feed, and were flushed, fat and large, and lazy, quite in the open meadow. ”

“ Into the high wood, however, at the last we drove them; and there, till daylight failed us, we did our work like men. By the cold light of the full moon we wended homeward, rejoicing in the possession of twenty-six couple and a half of cock, twelve brace of quail--we found another bevy on our way home and bagged three birds almost by moonlight--five ruffed grouse, and a rabbit. Before our wet clothes were well changed, supper was ready, and a good blow-out was followed by sound slumbers and sweet dreams, fairly earned by nine hours of incessant walking. ”

“ At the side-table, covered with guns, dog-whips, nipple-wrenches, and the like, Tim, rigged like his master, in half boots and leggins, but with a short roundabout of velveteen, in place of the full-skirted jacket, was filling our shot-pouches by aid of a capacious funnel, more used, as its odor betokened, to facilitate the passage of gin or Jamaica spirits than of so sober a material as cold lead. ”

“ A few miles farther yet, the road wheeled round the base of the Tourne Mountain, a magnificent bold hill, with a bare craggy head, its sides and skirts thick set with cedars and hickory--entering a defile through which the Ramapo, one of the loveliest streams eye ever looked upon, comes rippling with its crystal waters over bright pebbles, on its way to join the two kindred rivulets which form the fair Passaic. Throughout the whole of that defile, nothing can possibly surpass the loveliness of nature ”

“ A character was Tim--and now I think of it, worthy of brief description. Born, I believe--bred, certainly, in a hunting stable, far more of his life passed in the saddle than elsewhere, it was not a little characteristic of my friend Harry to have selected this piece of Yorkshire oddity as his especial body servant; but if the choice were queer, it was at least successful, for an honester, more faithful, hard-working, and withal, better hearted, and more humorous varlet never drew curry-comb over horse-hide, or clothes-brush over broad-cloth. ”

“ And, as he spoke, he moved a yard or two in front of us, and under his very feet, positively startling me by their noisy flutter, up sprang the gallant bevy: fifteen or sixteen well grown birds, crowding and jostling one against the other. Tom Draw's gun, as I well believe, was at his shoulder when they rose; at least his first shot was discharged before they had flown half a rood, and of course harmlessly: the charge must have been driven through them like a single ball; his second barrel instantly succeeded, and down came two birds, caught in the act of crossing. ”