TIIE AMERICAN DEEK. 229 



of woodlands, each one at the debouchure of a deer-path, 

 upon some lake, streamlet, or road which it may chance 

 to intersect, while the interior of the circuit is beat by 

 drivers and hounds, which force the deer from the tract 

 by one or other of the paths ; and than this, although it 

 has, I know, its passionate votaries, I can conceive no 

 duller, more poacher-like, or iess exciting sport if sport 

 it must be called. 



The standing shivering, or sweltering for hours, as it 

 may chance to be in August or in December, at a run- 

 way, perhaps not once hearing the hounds even at a 

 distance from morn till dewy eve ; perhaps catching for 

 a moment the volume of their cadenced cry, only to 

 hear it die away in the distance until the crack of a 

 remote rifle tells you that the deed is done, and that not 

 unto you is the doing of it; perhaps, if you have the 

 very best luck of it, hearing the cry come nigher, nigher, 

 swelling momently on the ear, hearing the bushes 

 shaken, and the dry sticks crackling under a rapid foot, 

 and then to complete the whole, seeing a great, timid, 

 trembling, helpless beast driven up to within ten feet of 

 the muzzle of your shot-gun or rifle, which, after whist- 

 ling or bleating at him to compel him to stop short in 

 his tracks and stand motionless as a mark for your buck- 

 shot practice, you incontinently butcher in cold blood. 



Yet a more scurvy mode than this, of deerjiunting, is 

 practiced by night, under the name of fire-hunting, in 

 two different ways, either by floating and paddling in 



