Or Perhaps The Hounds Are Out, And Horns Are
Blown, And Scarlet-Coated Huntsmen Flash Through The Clearings, And
The Solid Noise Of Horses Galloping Passes Below You, Where You Sit
Perched Among The Rocks And Heather.
The boar is afoot, and all
over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages, there is a vague
excitement and a vague hope; for who knows whither the chase may
lead?
And even to have seen a single piqueur, or spoken to a single
sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night.
Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are
few people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters
plying their axes steadily, and old women and children gathering
wood for the fire. You may meet such a party coming home in the
twilight: the old woman laden with a fagot of chips, and the
little ones hauling a long branch behind them in her wake. That is
the worst of what there is to encounter; and if I tell you of what
once happened to a friend of mine, it is by no means to tantalise
you with false hopes; for the adventure was unique. It was on a
very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky and a
frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall here be
nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much
hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green
pine-tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked
boulders. He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated
under a tree in an open. The old father knitted a sock, the mother
sat staring at the fire. The eldest son, in the uniform of a
private of dragoons, was choosing out notes on a key-bugle. Two or
three daughters lay in the neighbourhood picking violets. And the
whole party as grave and silent as the woods around them! My
friend watched for a long time, he says; but all held their peace;
not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out single
notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at his work and
made strange movements the while with his flexible eyebrows. They
took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which was
disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure
might have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange
dragoon. And as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the
awful insolubility of why they should be left out there in the
woods with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down, and a
growing disquietude as to what might happen next, became too much
for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels.
It might have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was
followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter.
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