the talk and the laughter went up too.


II

Up on the high moors, in the frank-chase, here indeed was a day to make
sad hearts rejoice. The air was soft, as if spring were come before his
time; and in the great wind that blew continually from the south-west,
bearing the high clouds swiftly against the blue, ruffling the stiff
heather-twigs and bilberry beneath--here was wine enough for any
mourners. Before them, as they went--two riding before, with falconers
on either side a little behind and the lads with the dogs beside them,
and the rest in a silent line some twenty yards to the rear--stretched
the wide, flat moor like a tumbled table-cloth, broken here and there by
groups of wind-tossed beech and oak, backed by the tall limestone crags
like pillar-capitals of an upper world; with here and there a little
shallow quarry whence marble had been taken for Derby. But more lovely
than all were the valleys, seen from here, as great troughs up whose
sides trooped the leafless trees--lit by the streams that threw back the
sunlit sky from their bosoms; with here a mist of smoke blown all about
from a village out of sight, here the shadow of a travelling cloud that
fled as swift as the wind that drove it, extinguishing the flash of
water only to release it again, darkening a sweep of land only to make
the sunlight that followed it the more sweet.

Yet the two saw little of this, dear and familiar as they found it;
since, first they rode together, and next, as it should be with young
hearts, the sport presently began and drove all else away.

The sport was done in this way: