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Deans have danced to the same wild piping, though their chapters have hushed the matter up. Even Duchesses (they say) have “come tripping doon the stair,” rapt by the climbing passion from their strawberry-leaved surroundings into starlit spaces. Nay, ourselves, too — the douce, respectable mediocrities that we are — which of us but might recall some fearful outbreak whose details are mercifully unknown to the household that calls us breadwinner and chief? What marvel that up yonder the Hunter smiles? When he knows that every one in his ken, the tinker with the statesman, has caught his bugle blast and gone forth on its irresistible appeal!

Not that they are so easily followed as of yore, those flying echoes of the horn! Joints are stiffer, maybe; certainly the desolate suburbs creep ever farther into the retreating fields; and when you reach the windy moorland, lo! it is all staked out into building-lots. Mud is muddier now than heretofore; and ruts are ruttier. And what friendless old beast comes limping down the dreary lane? He seems sorely shrunk and shoulder-shotten; but by the something of divinity in his look, still more than by the wings despondent along his mighty sides, ’tis ever the old Pegasus — not yet the knacker’s own. “Hard times I’ve been having,” he murmurs, as you rub his nose. “These fellows have really no seat except for a park hack. As for this laurel, we were wont to await it trembling: and in taking it we were afraid. Your English way of hunting it down with yelpings and hallooings — well, I may be out of date, but we wouldn’t have stood that sort of thing on Helicon.” So he hobbles down the road. Good night, old fellow! Out of date? Well, it may be so. And alas! the blame is ours.

But for the Hunter — there he rises — couchant no more. Nay, flung full stretch on the blue, he blazes, he dominates, he appals! Will his turn, then, really come at last? After some Armageddon of cataclysmal ruin, all levelling, whelming the County Councillor with the Music-hall artiste, obliterating the very furrows of the Plough, shall the skin-clad nomad string his bow once more, and once more loose the whistling shaft? Wildly incredible it seems. And yet — look up! Look up and behold him confident, erect, majestic — there on the threshold of the sky!