A MAYOR IN DANGER. 43 



ahead of them, they will swerve to avoid his society. 

 The deer charged, with several old stags at their 

 head, and the dauntless mayor rode right across them 

 on the side of a hill down which the herd were coming 

 at a thundering pace, — I take it, presuming on the 

 authority of chief magistrate. Two or three deer 

 jumped either behind or before his horse ; one old 

 stag came right at him; but, as it seemed to me, 

 dreading the shock of the horse, though lowering his 

 horns for mischief, he attempted to leap over him, 

 — and his antlers passing between the waistcoat of 

 the mayor and the horse's mane, he caught the dig- 

 nitary in the side with his knees, and pitched him off 

 his horse, so to speak, almost into the middle of next 

 week. The mayor went like a cricket-ball doAvn the 

 hill, but rose unharmed and in perfect good humour ; 

 refraining for the rest of the day to tilt with the foe. 

 And here, while treating of the red deer, it will not 

 be out of place to allude to the match I undertook 

 against fallow bucks in Charborough Park. The 

 stag and the buck are a different species of deer, and, 

 though to some it may seem superfluous to say so, 

 there are numbers who do not know the difference ; 

 even Sir Walter Scott, in " The Monastery," makes 

 the Abbot's kitchener call a male red deer by both 

 those appellations. Although the month was No- 

 vember in which the scene of the great novelist was 

 laid, the cook tells his superior " there are three 

 inches of fat on the stag's brisket," and a "better 

 haunch," though then just killed, would "never be 

 placed on his superior's table." Now, in Scotland, 

 the autumn frosts are earlier than they are with 

 us in the south ; and I take upon myself to say that 

 a stag of an age to be so fat would at that time 



