Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/38

34 skilful huntsmen. Leaving Keswick far behind, I pursued my cunning adversary from glen to cavern, till at last he fairly struck across an extensive tract of upland, and sought refuge from the hotness of pursuit in one of the distant mountains. I had not proceeded far on this wide and desolate tract ere I became fatigued and thirsty, and—what true sportsmen reckon a much more serious misfortune—found myself left alone and far behind—while the shout and the cheer of my late companions began to grow faint and fainter, and I at last heard only the bleat of the flocks or the calling of the curlew. The upland on which I had entered appeared boundless on all sides, while amid the brown wilderness arose innumerable green grassy knolls, with herds of small black cattle and sheep grazing or reposing on their sides and summits. They seemed so many green islands floating amid the ocean of brown blossom with which the heath was covered.

I stood on one of the knolls, and, looking around, observed a considerable stream gushing from a small copse of hazel and lady-fern, which, seeking its way into a green and narrow glen, pursued its course with a thousand freakish windings and turnings. While following with my eye the course of the pure stream out of which I had slaked my thirst, I thought I heard something like the sound of a human voice coming up the glen; and, with the hope of finding some of my baffled companions of the chase, I proceeded along the margin of the brook. At first, a solitary and stunted alder or hazel bush, or mountain ash, in which the hooded crow had sought shelter for her young, was all the protection the stream obtained from the rigour of the mid-day sun. The glen became broader and the stream deeper—gliding over a bed of pebbles, shining, large, and round, half-seen, half-hid beneath the projection of the grassy sward it had undermined; and raising all the while that soft and simmering din which contributes so much music to pastoral verse. A narrow footpath, seldom frequented, winded with the loops and turns of the brook. I had wandered along the margin nearly a quarter of a mile when I approached a large and doddered tree of green holly, on the top of which sat a raven, grey-backed and bald-headed from extreme age, looking down intently on something which it thought worthy of watching beneath.