me, I suppose, as a modern hunt on Exmoor;
a few of the terms are different. The stag is "embossed," meaning
"hidden in a thicket," and Chaucer says he is "rechased" when he means
he is headed back, while the note which the huntsman sounds to recall
the hounds when the stag is lost is a "forloyn." But stag-hunting
elsewhere than on Exmoor is virtually an archaic imitation of a sport.
The beast is carted to the meet, loosed, chased, and when brought to
bay is recaptured and carted back to captivity. Here it is a natural
affair, and rendered necessary by the depredations which the deer
commit on the farmers' crops; it also contains an element of danger to
the hunters, and calls for coolness, decision, and endurance: for the
pace is killing, the going rough, the hills tremendously steep, there
are rocky combes down which the rider has to plunge, streams to ford,
bogs which make the going unsafe, if not actually dangerous--and a
rider, unfamiliar with Exmoor, who finds himself caught in an October
mist had better jog quietly home before worse befall him--and, at the
last, the chance of losing the stag, or having him, as happens
occasionally, plunge desperately off the rocks into the sea.

The red deer is the most beautiful of all wild creatures in England;
seen in his native setting on these high, windy moors, the brown grass
and patches of purple heather all round him, the clear brown and white
streams of the combes where he waters, the blue shadows of hill behind
hill, and the grey billows of mist and cloud the wind sends rolling
down the hillsides, he is a noble beast indeed.

Wild-horses also run on Exmoor. Mr. Page, in his "Exploration of
Exmoor," advances the theory that they are not native ponies, like
those of the New Forest or parts of Scotland, but the descendants of
horses which the Phoenicians brought in their galleys when they traded
with Cornwall and Devon; for their bones are smaller and lighter than
those of our native ponies, and beautifully white and polished like
ivory, as are the bones of the Arab horses of the north coast of
Africa. This is an entertaining theory, with its romantic conjectures:
the picture of the Phoenician oared galleys pulling into Combe Martin
or Porlock Bay; the scenes on the beach, with the swarthy, beak-nosed
sailors, the Celts, eager for trade and curious to look at any
foreigners come from beyond the sea; the heaps of tin and silver, the
ivory and gold and Eastern gauds wi