in woodland appear anything but slow.

Many dark dells and lovely open glades did we thus hurrah by, and
across, with barely a glimpse in passing. In one place the path was
completely blocked up by two forest-trees, apparently but recently
rooted up; they had been rent from the earth, and flung here from
opposite sides, as though a mere stack of rushes, in the pride of their
vigour and in the full bloom of their beauty; and here they lay to
wither boll, and branch, and leaf.

A whirlwind had evidently descended on this very spot probably within a
few days; I say descended, for the whole circumference of the circle
devastated did not exceed twenty yards at most. One other tree, yet
fixed in the soil, presented an awful example of the might of the
tornado. It was a chestnut of the largest size, the trunk near the base
being seven or eight feet in circumference; it reclined at what seemed
to have been the very focus of the whirlwind; its roots yet clung to
earth; but, through the resistance thus offered, the tree had been
literally twisted round and round, until it was split into laths, the
trunk having the appearance of a great bundle of saplings peeled and
twined together by the hand of a Titan, as lads twist withy-wands; the
sturdy limbs and spreading branches, although little broken, were wound
about and knotted together in a way so curiously complicated as hardly
to be made comprehensible without the aid and evidence of sight.

Attracted by this singular forest wreck, I took to moralizing like the
melancholy Jaques, though in a strain not quite so well worthy of
record; and, losing sight of my company, was for some time thrown out.
When I caught the dogs up, it was found Reynard was fairly gone to earth
in an inaccessible ravine; so we even left him of necessity to his
repose, which had been tolerably well earned by a rattling burst of full
six miles on end.

In half an hour after we found again, when we got a second run, which,
with a couple of short checks, held us in sport for an hour and a half,
with a similar result.

By this time the day was growing smoking hot, whilst the dogs and horses
were anything but fresh; so it was agreed to collect our, by this time,
scattered forces, and turn the rein once again for the Lodge. To the
sound of "merrie horn and loud halloo" we took our way through the
pathless forest, picking up now a strayed hound and now a man astray,
until, by the time home was reached, all our