66 WARWICK WOODLANDS. 



hour, with only one or two faint colunms of blue smoke 

 worming their way up lazily into the cloudless atmos- 

 phere, a feeling of regret — such as has often crossed my 

 mind before, when leaving any place wherein I have 

 spent a few days happily, and which I never may see 

 more — rendered me somewhat indisposed to talk. 



Something or other- — it might with Harry, perhaps, 

 have been a similar train of thought — caused both my 

 comrades to be more taciturn by far than was their wont;, 

 and we had rattled over five miles of our route, and scaled . 

 the first ridge of the hills, and dived into the wide ravine; ■ 

 midway, the depth of this the pretty village of Bellevale 

 lies on the brink of the dammed rivulet, which, a few 

 yards below the neat stone bridge, takes a precipitous 

 leap of fifty feet, over a rustic wier, and rushes onward, 

 bounding from ledge to ledge of rifted rocks, chafing and 

 fretting as if it were doing a match against time, and 

 were in danger of losing its race. 



Thus we had passed the heavy lumber wagon, with Jem 

 and Garry perched on a board laid across it, and the four 

 couple of stanch hounds nestling in the straw which Tom 

 had provided in abundance for their comfort, before the 

 silence was broken by any sounds except the rattle of the 

 wheels, the occasional interjectional whistle of Harry to 

 his horses, or the flip of the well handled whip. 



Just, however, as we were shooting ahead of the lumber 

 wain, an exclamation from Tom Draw, which should have 

 been a sentence, had it not been very abruptly terminated 

 in a long rattling eructation, arrested Archer's progress. 



Pulling short up where a jog across the road constructed 

 — after the damnable mode adopted in all the hilly por- 

 tions of the interior — in order to prevent the heavy rains 

 from channelling the descent, afforded him a chance of 

 stopping- on the hill, so as to slack his traces. "How 

 now," he exclaimed ; "what the deuce ails you now, you 

 old rhinoceros?" 



"Oh, Archer, I feels bad; worst sort, by Judas! It's 

 that milk. punch, I reckon; it keeps a raising — raising, all 

 the time, like— ^ — " 



"And you want to lay it, I suppose, like a ghost, in a 

 sea of whiskey; well, I've no especial objection! Here, 

 Tim, hand the case bottle, and the dram cup ! No ! no ! 

 confound you pass it this way first, for if Tom once gets 



