n's eating when he was hungry, was quite
insensible of the by-play until Harold, reduced to extremity at sight
of one delicate shaving of turkey's breast, burst out, "I say,
Richardson, I must have some food. Cut me its leg, please, at once!"

"Harry," faintly groaned Eustace, while Lord Erymanth observed, "Ah!
there is no such receipt for an appetite as shooting in the snow. I
remember when a turkey's leg would have been nothing to me, after being
out duck-shooting in Kalydon Bog. Have you been there to-day? There
would be good sport."

"No," said Harold, contented at last with the great leg, which seemed
in the same proportion to him as a chicken's to other men. "I have
been getting sheep out of the snow."

I elicited from him that he had, in making his way to Erymanth, heard
the barking of a dog, and found that a shepherd and his flock had taken
refuge in a hollow of the moor, which had partly protected them from
the snow, but whence they could not escape. The shepherd, a drover who
did not know the locality, had tried with morning light to find his way
to help, but, spent and exhausted, would soon have perished, had not
Harold been attracted by the dog. After dragging him to the nearest
farm, Harold left the man to be restored by food and fire, while
performing his own commission at the castle, and then returned to spend
the remainder of the daylight hours in helping to extricate the sheep,
and convey them to the farmyard, so that only five had been lost.

"An excellent, not to say a noble, manner of spending a winter's day,"
quoth the earl.

"I am a sheep farmer myself," was the reply.

Lord Erymanth really wanted to draw him out, and began to ask about
Australian stock-farming, but Harold's slowness of speech left Eustace
to reply to everything, and when once the rage of hunger was appeased,
the harangues in a warm room after twenty miles' walk in the snow, and
the carrying some hundreds of sheep one by one in his arms, produced
certain nods and snores which were no favourable contrast with
Eustace's rapt attention.

For, honestly, Eustace thought these speeches the finest things he had
ever heard, and though he seldom presumed to understand them, he
listened earnestly, and even imitated them in a sort of disjointed way.
Now Lord Erymanth, if one could manage to follow him, was always
coherent. His sentences would parse, and went on uniform
principles--namely, the repeating every phrase in finer word