CHAPTER XIV 



August on the Moors: A Shooting Lodge 



IVE us the August moors for the ideal of an 

 earthly Paradise. The moors and the hills, 

 a perpetual twelfth, with the flush of vigorous excite- 

 ment or early youth, fresh as the waking breeze that 

 lifts the skirts of the mist-mantle still enveloping the 

 drowsy mountain tops ; with spirits buoyant as the air 

 that sends the light pulses of your heart bounding along 

 at the double ; with hopes of autumn sport bright as 

 the glittering dewdrops sown broadcast over grass and 

 heather. Most refined ideal of the earthly Paradise, as 

 it can shape itself to the mental eye in exaggerated 

 anticipation of realities, for it sends you to familiar 

 communing with all that is sweet and sublime in nature. 

 Sin and death must enter, of course, for the Paradise 

 is earthly, and in a sense sensual. They must enter as 

 they enter its counterpart of the Far West, the happy 

 hunting-grounds of the Indian savage. The difference 

 is, that there they reign, while here they subordinate 

 themselves on sufferance. While the brave dreams his 



eternal joy in an interminable round of insatiate 



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