perfect chorus of bird harmony filled the air. Thrushes innumerable poured forth their song, whose sweet and liquid notes gurgled upon the ear as though through organ pipes. Robins, too, and blackbirds were not slow to join in, and then the soft amorous coo of wood-pigeons, and through all—thrown as it were from copse to copse—the blithe and gladsome shout of answering cuckoos.

Wagram opened a gate noiselessly, and with equally noiseless tread moved along one of the “rides” of a wood. On his shoulder was a rabbit rifle—one of some power and driving capacity—with which he was wont to practise long shots at outlying but uncommonly suspicious and wideawake Bunny. Things rustled in the undergrowth and brambles on either side, as though stealthily creeping away. A slight stirring of the grass caught his eye, and, as he bent over it, an adder contracted itself into a letter S, with its heart-shaped head somewhat lifted, alert, defensive. He raised the rifle so as to bring down the butt upon the snake—then seemed to think better of it.

“Poor little brute. The chances are ten thousand to one against it ever damaging anybody in a place like this, and those chances it can have the benefit of.”

He touched it with the muzzle of the gun, amused by the impotent wrath wherewith the small reptile struck at the cold iron. Then he went on his way.

He reached a gate and peered over. Two or three rabbits were out feeding, but they darted like lightning into cover before he had time so much as to raise the piece. Passing out of the gate he crossed the open meadow.

In front a gleam of water, and beyond it the skipping forms of young lambs, whose shrill bleat harmonised with the multitudinous bird voices, and the green loveliness of the picture. Leaning lazily on the parapet of an old stone bridge which spanned the river, Wagram watched the ripple here and there of a rising trout, or the perky flirtings of a pair of water-ouzels, whose nest clung, excrescence-like, against one of the stone piers. Away down stream the roof of a picturesque old mill, its wheel for the nonce still and silent, and beyond, pointing above more woods, the spire of a distant church.

Again that well-nigh ecstatic sense of possession—of ownership—came over him, and now, giving himself up to it, he fairly revelled in it. The utter solitude of the spot constituted, in his eyes, one of its greatest charms. He could wander at will without meeting a human being, and though here the bridge carried on a public 

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