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embrace of a dear mother?-how her poor snow-white hand wandered through the mazes of our flowing locks?-how her pure eye glistened, as in fondest love she listened to our simultaneous relations of every incident of our adventures ?-how heartfelt and how fervent was that night's nightly blessing? Ah, no! Child as I was, much as I loved the thoughts of fishing, and longed to be a fisherman, I never did and never could enjoy fishing in such a location as a leaden cistern in dark and smoky London!"

"What a happy time is childhood!" exclaimed Mrs. Percy, musingly. "I would not value much the disposition of that created being, who in after years could look back, and dwell without emotion, or without lingering, though perhaps with melancholy joy, on that period of existence. It may well be said that that is the happiest time of life!"

"It is an old saying," observed Mr. Percy ;

'It is old and plain :

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,

And the free maids that weave their threads with bone,

Do use to chaunt it ;'

yet I cannot submit to its correctness, and I would debate it. How would it be, as the old duet we sang last night has it,

'Could a man be secure

That his life would endure

For a thousand, a thousand long years'

might it not be, I say, that when we arrived at our 990th year, that we should then look back upon our riper years, now our middle age, as fraught with more real enjoyment than our childhood's? It is true, in

youth we have less of care and no permanent anxiety; but childish cares and anxieties we have, nevertheless. Childhood is more volatile, much more buoyant; and if I mistake not, pleasures then make a far deeper impression than pains. The latter we forget: they

'Overcome us like the summer's cloud,
Without our special wonder.'

Our joys make more lasting impression: on those we dwell, as every one loves to dwell, with delight. Yet look back again, and you will find our childhood-happiness is not one all-pervading blaze of sunshine, but is rather composed of occasional bright flashes, intervening like angels' visits. My happiest days were during my college life. Deeply fond of books, I used to linger round those ancient walls of Usher College, free from all worldly care; secluded, as in those days we were, from converse with the world, under the ban of No Popery.'"

Not

"For my part, Percy," summed up Mr. South, "I agree with you to this extent that we are more wont to encourage in our mind the bright spots, the white-chalked days, forgetful of our sorrows. These I remember well, and many of them. But of all my sorrows, one, only one, clings to my recollection. But one! and what an one was that! fifty years of hard struggling after-life have wiped away the vividness of that dark wintry hour. How, in those bright summer-hours, I remember I had a beauteous loving mother! Oh that seraphic smile, that brilliant eye, that fatally glowing cheek, too bright to last! and we in

early life left without that balm which a mother's love alone can give to after-troubles ! I would willingly have forgotten all other sorrows; that one I cannot forget; and it has perhaps cast that gloom over my young days, which induces my non-accordance with the general proposition about the happiest period of our existence. During some portion, certainly the latter, of my school-days, I was happy enough, because kindly treated these things depend so much on the chapter of accidents. But chacun à son goût. Give me these days with you, and let us

'Laugh away the present,

While laughing hours remain :'

-that's the best philosophy after all."

KNAPSACK WANDERINGS IN MERRIE ENGLAND.

BY LINTON.

No. V.

"Awake and be stirring, the daylight's appearing;

The wind's in the south, and the mountains are clearing;

A thousand wild deer in the forest are feeding,

And 'perchance' before night' a fine hart' shall lie bleeding."

It may be readily conceived that the fatigue and pleasant excitement of the previous day had caused me fully to enjoy the downy couch on which I found myself the following morning; but what real lover of field. sports cares a pin's head for a bed, however soft, with a chance of a run, or a good day's shooting before him? With much truth, therefore, I may assert, that the bright sun of a glorious autumnal morning had scarcely peeped over the eastern hill tops, and cast its cheerful rays across the Combe, ere invigorated and nerved by the calm rest of night. I had thrown open my windows and looked on that pleasant wood-clad vale, which time and the fading daylight of the previous evening had scarcely permitted me to enjoy, when justly might I have exclaimed in the beautiful words of Scott, for the whole glen was alive with the cheerful voices of innumerable songsters:

"At morn the blackcock trims his jetty wing;
'Tis morning prompts the linnet s blithest lay;
All Nature's children feel the matin spring
Of life reviving with reviving day."

Fortunately" a westerly wind and a cloudy sky," which "proclaim a hunting morning," are not necessary adjuncts to the song which foreshadows a brilliant "wild red deer" chace over the beautiful forest of Exmoor. If so, my expectations on this my first visit to the western moors, subsequently so fortunately realized, would have been considerably damped,

for not a cloud floated on the deep blue heavens, and as the few wreaths of mist which still lingered in the valley and o'er the rushing stream disappeared over the wood-clad hills, it would have been impossible, at home or abroad, to have looked on a more sparkling, more laughing, more splendid and joyous morning; one of those golden autumnal mornings when the saddest heart is lightened by God's glorious works, and warmed into renewed hope; one of those clear and elastic mornings, in fact, when the eye is bright, the heart bounding with good fellowship, the body nerved, the mind in full vigour; such a morning as is not seldom met with on the western moors of Merrie England, invigorating, health-inspiring, almost intoxicating; may be met with on the moors of Scotland or mountains of Switzerland; but never at Boulogne, or Dieppe, or down the Rhine or up the Rhine, or at any of the ninetynine hundred places honest people are wont to flock to, and spend their money at, with ninety-nine hundred far more beautiful and more healthy places, which they have scarcely ever heard of, because forsooth they are in England!

Well, good friends and sportsmen all, having inhaled a quart of fresh air from the hill tops which closed in the lovely valley I gazed on, in my "snowy chemise"-I wish I could get Mr. Leech to send an illustration of the scene, in order to form an engraving for the magazine-I slipped into a warm and easy dressing-gown, and sought my host and our companion of the previous night. Alas! that harbinger of pain and pleasure, the post, had brought bad news; for be it known the former is a magistrate of two counties, and his immediate presence was required, nolens volens, at a neighbouring town. While entering the chamber of the latter to tell him the sad tale, I was knocked, as some quaint inventor of loose phrases has observed, "all of a heap," at the picture I beheld. Sketch it I might with a pencil: with a pen the scene is somewhat more difficult to illustrate.

Fancy an active, amiable, warm-hearted, merry sporting gentleman in the prime of life, with whom you had parted on the previous evening full of hilarity and anxious expectation of a gallop across the moors on the following morning, converted I may say, in a few short hours, into a decrepid irritable old man, by the tortures of lumbago, or rheumatism, or neuralgia, or some other ism or algia which during the night had seized him with an iron grasp. And thus instead of rising, as had I, with all energy and joyous anticipation of the coming day's sport, I found him writhing in agony. Pluck, and the hope of an improved state of things after breakfast, had only carried him into his leathers and one boot, from which a red-faced stable-lad was in vain endeavouring to relieve him when I entered, as he lay groaning on the floor.

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By St. Hubert!" said I, on beholding the scene; "a tight boot, eh! old fellow? Bad thing, believe me, for the field. Always give plenty of room for the calf, and an inch play at least for the great toe, with little less for the instep. Talking of insteps, mine is somewhat a high one-considered, I fancy, a personal beauty; nevertheless, a young lady once asked me if I had bruised my foot, the instep was so swollen."

"Devil take your instep, and your foot too," burst forth from my poor suffering friend. "Play for the calf? play for the d! Oh! oh! oh! Pull, my lad! pull, or I shall die." And as the boot at length

"

came off, after a long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether, at which I assisted, and my friend rolled on the floor in perspiration and agony, as well as in his leathers, I began to think that there really was something wrong, and at once ceased my laughter, and aided in pulling off the leathers also, as well as the "butes," as the Devon lad termed them, and getting his master into bed, where, poor fellow, he remained more or less for several days,

"While a hunting I did go."

The cheery feelings of the morning, notwithstanding a continuance of the bright sun, and a first-rate breakfast, were nevertheless somewhat subdued as we rode forth together, and I bid adieu, for the day at least, to my host, who turned as we entered the little Melton of the West-the towards the point to which his magisterial duties led him, I along the sparkling waters of the Barle to the heathered hills of Exmoor.

Blue was the vault of heaven, fresh the morning breeze, as I mounted the wood-clad hill, now here and there catching pleasant peeps of the little river and golden vale below me, from the road which led to the open moorland or forest of Exmoor on the high ground; till at length I fairly merged from these deep and solemn Devon lanes, to what I then believed to be Exmoor de facto, but which was nevertheless only Exmoor under rude cultivation, with fourteen miles between me and the meet at Brenton Barton, hard by that one of Nature's gems of the west country, Lynmouth. Nevertheless I had time, and to spare, to ruminate on things past and present; the more so that, although my steed, familiarly named "Boreas," from his lasting qualities of wind and stamina, possessed both blood, bone, and condition, and moreover carried under ten stone, though equal to carry twelve-the only animal a man should ever endeavour to follow hounds across the moor on-I did not press him, being desirous both horse and rider should appear before some two score defiers of bogs, walls, and banks, "con tutti il splendore del mondo," which I am told (recollect I by no means answer to the fact) is as pure Italian as would be used by King Bomba, that gentle sportive lamb, who lives, at or about Naples, on macarroni and cruel despotism, and being translated means in first-rate condition.

Thus we jogged gently on, ruminating and admiring, till at length the real heather-clad hills appeared, and I pulled the rein of Boreas to look far and wide, around and before me, on brightness and beauty, if so be the beauty in character was strange to one unaccustomed to moorland scenery. The lark carolled high in mid-air, the heather smelt fresh and sweet, and looked lovely; though some poet, if I recollect, thus writes:

"Gem of the heath! whose modest bloom

Sheds beauty o'er the lonely moor,

Though thou dispense no rich perfume,
Nor yet with splendid tints allure."

And as I looked, first on my leathers and tops, and then at the scene, and felt the warm sun, and beheld the dusty road and the flowery banks, methought, "This is no hunting day sure-a-ly' more fit for a picknick with merry lasses, than a gallop after fleet hounds." But I was in error for all that, as the sequel will show. Two more miles of Exmoor proper and no mistake, and we halted before the door of the Red Deer.

Would that I could assert that the inducement to enter, held forth by "good entertainment for man and beast," was verified by practical demonstration! Alas! far from it. If so, men and beasts on the moor are easily satisfied. True that Boreas had a feed of corn, and to all appearance enjoyed it, notwithstanding the grit and dust that shared in the filling of the measure. But Boreas's rider was by no means so well

cared for.

The Red Deer stood alone in its glory on the wild moor-welcome harbour of rest doubtless to many a tired foot traveller or hawker, of which there are many in those parts, who halt by the wayside alike for rest and to do a little business in their calling among the women kind, shepherds, and rural labourers, who might chance to linger abont this so-called hostelry; celebrated, I fancy, only for the name it bears; in other respects a somewhat dirty and very airy farm-house, attached to the moorland farm, of which the worthy landlord was the tenant. Would that I were permitted to offer to my readers a wood-cut of such moorland scenes as they are. I can only say, for the benefit of sportsmen who pass that way, that the Red Deer is a lone house, protected in a measure from the north by a few rude farm-buildings; on the east by a few trees struggling to live; on the west by nothing; on the south looking far and wide over a heather-clad moor, bright and cheering on the morning I beheld it, covered here and there with pink patches of heather, elsewhere with dark moss and peat land. Let imagination draw the picture of what it must be, on a bleak, sleety, wintry day-a charming situation possibly, to those who are compelled to live there. However, on that well-remembered day to me, the present was full of interest, the future full of hope; and so, having dismounted and handed over Boreas to a doubtless most amiable, but certainly not prepossessing Devon farm lad, I entered by the front-door of the hostelry, which led into a passage terminated by an open back door vis-à-vis, ventilating most effectually the whole premises, but which nevertheless, considering its airy situation, scarcely required it; and having encountered a somewhat lusty and not over-clean stockingless young-lady-of-all-work, I requested to be informed as to the state of the Red Deer cellar; on which she politely threw open a side door, and I was shown into an apartment, the carpet on which was moorland sand, the furniture a table and two chairs, the walls being decorated with three paintings, or rather painted engravings (I like to be particular when art is concerned); as far as I recollect, the one being intended to represent Moses in the bulrushes; the second a young gentleman in sailor's attire, squeezing a young woman in his arms on the sea-shore, with a large ship in the offing, evidently intended by the artist and the sailor to remain there till he squeezed his last adieu; with a fat prize pig in the centre.

"Well, Sally," said I, having duly admired the pictures, "have you any bitter beer?"

"Noo; us arn't, never a gulging** it here."

"Well, any bottled porter?"

"No, zur; us haint nort of sich."

"Bottled cider? surely Devon is famous for cider."

"Us aint no bottle cider, but us are got sum zider."

* Drinking-lioguæ Devoniensis.

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