90 WARWICK WOODLANDS* 



The sun had risen fairly, but the hour was still too early for the 

 sweet peaceful music of the church-going bells to have made 

 their echoes tunable through the rich valley. A merry caval- 

 cade, indeed, we started Harry leading the way at his usual 

 slap-dash pace, so that one, less a workman than himself, would 

 have said he went up hill and down at the same break-neck 

 pace, find would take all the grit out of his team before he had 

 gone ten miles while a more accurate observer would have 

 seen, at a glance, that he varied his rate at almost every ine- 

 quality of road, that he quartered every rut, avoided every jog 

 or mud-hole, husbanded for the very best his horses' strength, 

 never making them either pull or hold a moment longer than 

 was absolutely necessary from the abruptness of the ground. 



At his left hand sat I, while Tom, in honor of his superior 

 bulk and weight, occupied with his magnificent and portly per- 

 son the whole of the back seat, keeping his countenance as 

 sanctified as possible, and nodding, with some quaint and char- 

 acteristic observation, to each one of the scattered groups of 

 country-people, which we encountered every quarter of a mile 

 for the first hour of our route, wending their way toward the 

 village church but, when we reached the forest-mantled road 

 which clombe the mountain, making the arched woods resound 

 to many a jovial catch or merry hunting chorus. 



Mounted sublime on an arm- chair lashed to the forepart of 

 the pig-box, sat Timothy in state his legs well muffled in a 

 noble scarlet-fringed buffalo skin, and his body encased in his 

 livery top-coat the setters and the spaniels crouching most 

 meekly at his feet, and the two noble bucks the fellow on 

 whose steaks we had already made an inroad, having been left 

 as fat Tom's portion securely corded down upon a pile of 

 straw, with their sublime and antlered crests drooping all spirit- 

 less and humble over the backboard, toward the frozen soil 

 which crashed and rattled under the ponderous hoofs of the 

 magnificent roan horse Tom's special favorite which, though 

 full seventeen hands high, and heavy in proportion, yet showing 

 a good strain of blood, trotted away with his huge load at full 

 ten miles an hour. 



Plunging into the deep recesses of the Greenwoods, hill after 

 hill we scaled, a toilsome length of stony steep ascents, almost 

 precipitous, until we reached the back-bone of the mountain 

 ridge a rugged, bare, sharp edge of granite rock, without a 

 particle of soil upon it, diving down at an angle not much less 



