206 ANOTHER HUNTING STORY. 



tation in the Carol inas, he quitted the country, and em- 

 barked for California. 



Pompey still lives at Ramson House. He has replaced 

 Slouch in the management of his master's business trans- 

 actions, and Mr. Ramson has lost nothing by the change. 



I will now relate another hunting story, in which I 

 myself played the hero's part : 



On a beautiful day in autumn this is the ordinary 

 commencement of romances, but mine will be a perfectly 

 true history I found myself, some twenty-five years ago, 

 at a tavern kept by an Irishman on the borders of Big 

 Wolf Lake, about thirty miles from the great sheets of 

 water named the Paranacs, in the northern district of the 

 State of New York. 



I had been invited by a gentleman farmer, whose 

 acquaintance I had made at Newport during the season 

 of the baths, to spend a week or two with him, and hunt 

 the stag after every American fashion. According to 

 Mr. Eustace, a charming companion at the table and in 

 the hunting-field, a gay devotee of " sport," whatever the 

 kind, and wherever it was to be found. the woods sur- 

 rounding his farm of Crow's Nest swarmed with animals, 

 and I might easily enjoy the gratification of bringing 

 down a dozen or two of roebucks. Assuredly, a dozen 

 stags that is, two a day for a week would have sufficed 

 me ; but four a day seemed an exceptional figure, and I 

 was anxious to ascertain whether Mr. Eustace had not 

 drawn a little too freely on his imagination, and boasted 

 too extravagantly of his hunting domain. 



I had arrived at Crow's Nest on a fine October day, 

 and been received by Mr. Eustace with a truly American 



