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46 smoke it floated down on the wind, Erceldoune would have contemptuously denied that Chance could ever affect a life justly balanced and rightly held in rein. He would have said Chance was a deity for women, fatalists, and fools; a Fetish worshipped by the blind. The Border chiefs of the King's Rest had believed in the might of a strong arm and in the justice cleft by a long two-edged sword, and left weaklings to bow to Hazard:—and the spirit of their creed was still his. Yet he might have read a lesson from the death of the moorland eagle;—one chance shot from the barrel hid in the heather, and power, strength, liberty, keen sight, and lordly sovereignty of solitude were over, and the king-bird reeled and fell! But to draw the parable would not have been at all like his vigorous nature;—a state courier has not much habitude or taste for Oriental metaphors and highly-spiced romances, and he had too much of the soldier, the Shikari, the man of the world and the Arab combined, to leave him anything whatever of the poet or the dreamer. Men of action may hare grave, but they never have visionary thoughts, and life with Erceldoune was too gallant, strong, and rapid a stream—ever in incessant motion, though calm enough, as deep waters mostly are—