is dog Bruno--these things had developed in him
new aptitudes both of mind and body, which were in themselves
exhilaration. He carried his dwarf's frame more erect, breathed from an
ampler chest. As for his work at the Court, he thought of it often with
impatience and disgust. It was a more useful blind than his cobbling, or
he would have shammed illness and got quit of it.

"Them were sharp uns that managed that business at Tudley End!" He fell
thinking about it and chuckling over it as he smoked. Two of Westall's
best coverts swept almost clear just before the big shoot in
November!--and all done so quick and quiet, before you could say "Jack
Robinson." Well, there was plenty more yet, more woods, and more birds.
There were those coverts down there, on the Mellor side of the
hollow--they had been kept for the last shoot in January. Hang him! why
wasn't that fellow up to time?

But no one came, and he must sit on, shivering and smoking, a sack
across his shoulders. As the stir of nerve and blood caused by the
ferreting subsided, his spirits began to sink. Mists of Celtic
melancholy, perhaps of Celtic superstition, gained upon him. He found
himself glancing from side to side, troubled by the noises in the wood.
A sad light wind crept about the trunks like a whisper; the owls called
overhead; sometimes there was a sudden sharp rustle or fall of a branch
that startled him. Yet he knew every track, every tree in that wood. Up
and down that field outside he had followed his father at the plough, a
little sickly object of a lad, yet seldom unhappy, so long as childhood
lasted, and his mother's temper could be fled from, either at school or
in the fields. Under that boundary hedge to the right he had lain
stunned and bleeding all a summer afternoon, after old Westall had
thrashed him, his heart scorched within him by the sense of wrong and
the craving for revenge. On that dim path leading down the slope of the
wood, George Westall had once knocked him down for disturbing a sitting
pheasant. He could see himself falling--the tall, powerful lad standing
over him with a grin.

Then, inconsequently, he began to think of his father's death. He made a
good end did the old man. "Jim, my lad, the Lord's verra merciful," or
"Jim, you'll look after Ann." Ann was the only daughter. Then a sigh or
two, and a bit of sleep, and it was done.

And everybody must go the same way, must come to the same stopping of
the breath, the same awfu