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‘”Ain’t you well, sir?” said he. “You needn’t be afeard; it’s only at the fall of the year the stags is wicked.”

‘I don’t know what I answered at first; but the fellow understood me when I shook his hand frantically, and told him that I should thank him to the last day of my life, and that I would not have missed it for a thousand pounds. In part-proof whereof I gave him a sovereign on the spot, which seemed to clear my character in his eyes as much as the crying at the sight of a herd of deer had mystified it.’

‘Claude, well-beloved,’ said I, ‘will you ever speak contemptuously of sportsmen any more?’

‘”Do manus,” I have been vilifying them, as one does most things in the world, only for want of understanding them. How shall I do penance? Go and take service with Edwin Landseer, as pupil, colour- grinder, footboy?’

‘You will then be very near to a very great poet,’ quoth I, ‘and one whose works will become, as centuries roll on, more and more valuable to art and to science, and, possibly, to something higher than either.’

‘I begin to guess your meaning,’ answered Claude.

‘So we lounged, and dreamt, and fished, in heathery Highland,’ as Mr. Clough would say, while the summer snipes flitted whistling up the shallow before us, and the soft, south-eastern clouds slid lazily across the sun, and the little trout snapped and dimpled at a tiny partridge hackle, with a twist of orange silk, whose elegance for shape and colour reconciled Claude’s heart somewhat to my everlasting whipping of the water. When as last:-

‘You seem to have given up catching anything. You have not stirred a fish in this last two pools, except that little saucy yellow shrimp, who jumped over your fly, and gave a spiteful slap at it with his tail.’

Too true; and what could be the cause? Had that impudent sand-piper frightened all the fish on his way up? Had an otter paralysed them with terror for the morning? Or had a stag been down to drink? We saw the fresh slot of his broad claws, by the bye, in the mud a few yards back.

‘We must have seen the stag himself, if he had been here lately,’ said Claude.

‘Mr. Landseer knows too well by this time that that is a non sequitur.’

‘”I am no more a non sequitur than you are,” answered the Cornish magistrate to the barrister.’

‘Fish and deer, friend, see us purblind sons of men somewhat more quickly than we see them, fear sharpening the senses. Perhaps, after all, the fault is in your staring white-straw hat, a garment which has spoilt many a good day’s fishing. Ah, no! there is the cause; the hat of a mightier than you–the thunder-spirit himself. Thor is at hand, while the breeze, awe-stricken, falls dead calm before his march. Behold, climbing above that eastern ridge, his huge powdered cauliflower-wig, barred with a grey horizontal handkerchief of mist.’

‘Oh, profane and uncomely simile!–which will next, I presume, liken the coming hailstorm to hair-powder shaken from the said wig.’

‘To shot rather than to powder. Flee, oh, flee to yonder pile of crags, and thank your stars that there is one at hand; for these mountain tornadoes are at once Tropic in their ferocity and Siberian in their cutting cold.’

Down it came. The brown hills vanished in white sheets of hail, first falling perpendicularly, then slanting and driving furiously before the cold blast which issued from the storm. The rock above us rang with the thunder-peals; and the lightning, which might have fallen miles away, seemed to our dazzled eyes to dive into the glittering river at our feet. We sat silent some half-hour, listening to the voice of One more mighty than ourselves; and it was long after the uproar had rolled away among the hills, and a steady, sighing sheet of warmer rains, from banks of low grey fog, had succeeded the rattling of the hail upon the crisp heather, that I turned to Claude.