ANECDOTES OF CASTAGNO. 
85 
of the Spirit of the Times to wad my gun, never enters a house in 
the village without laying his grip on all the almanacs. He is a 
well-trained setter, that never flushes in the fields — was raised in 
Vendee, where the pheasant is unknown. I ask myself, then, 
where he has learned that two or three light barks are sufficient to 
make a pheasant fly up from the ground on a tree ; for after hunt- 
ing two months in a forest where pheasants abound, Castagno was 
not ashamed to use this method of the basset any more than to 
steal partridges out of the game-bags of my companions and bring 
them to me. One of my friends, who knew the rogue thoroughly, 
and had more than once been a victim of his tricks, has surnamed 
him Rodin. One of Castagno’s favorite sports is to hide the hunt- 
ing-whips, instruments of which he has had cause to complain, it 
would seem, in his youth. When the scamp is too far before me 
in the woods or field, and I permit myself to recall him, his first 
impulse, the best, is to obey me ; but doubtless he reflects after- 
ward that it may be dangerous to allow a master to acquire a bad 
habit, for he suddenly pretends to have got a scent of game, and 
stops motionless in a posture of interrogation and in a half set. It 
is a mode of proceeding that means to say. My master, you see 
that I am fastened here by my countersign, and that it is impossi- 
ble for me to obey your orders ; could you not give yourself the 
trouble to come to me ? How I have hardly caught up with him, 
when he breaks his set, and observes to me, with an air of perfect 
frankness, that it was only an old scent, and that he is very sorry 
to have called me for so small an affair ; but I have come three 
quarters of the way, and the idle fellow has spared his trouble. 
He asked no more. 
I have often invited Castagno to vary this mystification, which 
he abuses ; he unfortunately sticks to it, and finds it always ex- 
j cellent. Charming gossip he is besides, powerfully titled in ca- 
j balism, and pushing the corporate spirit even to fanaticism. 
I Once when Charles Dain, the brilliant orator, the eloquent and 
impassioned painter of tropical nature, was relating to us a dramat- 
% ic episode of the Antilles — the history of a hunter of Martinique, 
- saved from the bite of a trigonocephalus by the devotion of his 
I dog — Castagno, who had seemed to take an immense interest in the 
