sible to the recoils and disgusts of humanity. I have known him take up a huge adder, cut off its head, and then deposit the living and writhing body in his brimless hat, and walk with it coiling and wreathing about his head, like another Medusa, till the sport of the day was over, and he carried it home to secure the fat. With all his stubbornness of nature, he was of a most mild and gentle demeanour, had a fine placidity of countenance, and a quick blue eye, beaming with good-humour. His face was sunburnt to a general pale vermilion blue, that overspread all his features. His very hair was sunburnt too. His costume was generally a smockfrock, of no doubtful complexion, dirt-coloured, which hung round him in tatters like fringe, rather augmenting than diminishing the freedom, and, if I may so say, the gallantry of his bearing. His frock was furnished with a huge inside pocket, in which to deposit the game killed by his patrons; for of his three employments, that which consisted of finding hares for the great farmers and small gentry who were wont to course on the common, was by far the most profitable and most pleasing to him and to them. Everybody liked Tom Cordery. He had himself an aptness to like, which is certain to be repaid in kind. The very dogs knew him, and loved him, and would beat for him almost as soon as for their master. Even May, the most sagacious of greyhounds, appreciated his talents, and would as soon listen to Tom's so-hoing, as to old Tray giving tongue.

Nor was his conversation less agreeable to the other part of the company. Servants and masters were equally desirous to secure Tom. Besides his general and professional familiarity with beasts and birds, their ways and doings-a knowledge so minute and accurate that it might have put to shame many a professed naturalist-he had no small acquaintance with the goings-on of that unfeathered biped called man; in short, he was, next after Lucy, who recognised his rivalry by hating, decrying, and undervaluing him, by far the best news-gatherer of the country side. His news he of course picked up on the civilised side of the parish (there is no gossiping in the forest), partly at that well-frequented inn the Red Lion-of which Tom was a regular and noted supporter,-partly amongst his several employers, and partly by his own sagacity. In the matter of marriages (pairings he was wont to call them), he relied chiefly on his own. skill in noting certain preliminary indications; and certainly for a guesser by profession, and a very bold one, he was astonishingly often right. At

the ale-house especially he was of the first authority. An air of mild importance, a diplomatic reserve on some points, great smoothness of speech, and that gentleness which is so often the result of conscious power, made him there an absolute ruler. Perhaps the effect of these causes might be a little aided by the latent dread which that power inspired in others. Many an exploit had proved that Tom Cordery and one arm was fairly worth any two on the common. The pommelling of Bob Blott, and the levelling of Jem Serle to the earth by one swing of a huge old hare (which unusual weapon, was by the way, the first slain of Mayflower, on its way home to us in that walking cupboard his pocket, when the unlucky rencontre with Jem Serle broke two heads, the dead and the living), arguments such as these might have some cogency at the Red Lion.

But he managed everybody as your gentle-mannered person is apt to do. Even the rude squires and rough farmers, his temporary masters, he managed, particularly as far as concerned the last, and was sure to bring them round to his own peculiar fancies or prejudices, however strongly their own wishes might turn them aside from the direction indicated, and however often Tom's sagacity in that instance might have been found at fault. Two spots in the large wild enclosures into which the heath had been divided were his especial favourites-the Hundred Acres, alias the Poor Allotment, alias the Burnt-Common.—(Do any or all of these titles convey any notion of the real destination of that many-named place? A piece of moorland portioned out to serve for fuel to the poor of the parish—this was one. Oh, the barrenness of this miserable moor! Flat, marshy, dingy, bare. Here, that piece of green treachery, a bog; there, parched, and pared, and shrivelled, and black with smoke and ashes; utterly desolate and wretched everywhere, except where, amidst the desolation, blossomed, as if in mockery, the enamelled gentianella. No hares ever came there; they had too much taste. Yet thither would Tom lead his unwary employers; thither, however warned, or cautioned, or experienced, would he by reasoning or induction, or by gentle persuasion, or by actual fraud, entice the hapless gentlemen; and then to see him with his rabble of finders pacing up and down this precious "sittingground" (for so was Tom, thriftless liar, wont to call it), pretending to look for game, counterfeiting a meuse, forging a form, and telling a story some ten years old of a famous hare once killed on that spot by his honour

and favourite bitch Marygold. I never could thoroughly understand whether it were design, a fear that too many hares might be killed, or a real and honest mistake, a genuine prejudice in favour of the place, that influenced Tom Cordery on this point. Half the one, perhaps, and half the other. Mixed motives, let Pope and his disciples say what they will, are by far the commonest in this parti-coloured world. Or he had shared the fate of greater men, and lied till he believed--a coursing Cromwell, beginning in hypocrisy and ending in fanaticism. Another pet spot was the Gallows-Piece, an enclosure almost as large as the Hundred Acres, where a gibbet had once borne the bodies of two murderers, with the chains and bones, even in my remembrance, clanking and creaking in the wind. The gibbet was gone now, but the name remained, and the feeling, deep, sad, and shuddering. The place, too, was wild, awful, fearful; a heathy, furzy spot, sinking into broken hollows, where murderers might lurk; a few withered pines at the upper end, and amongst them, half hidden by the brambles, the stone on which the gallows had been fixed ;— the bones must have been mouldering beneath. All Tom's eloquence, seconded by two capital courses, failed to drag me thither a second time.

Tom was not, however, without that strong sense of natural beauty which they who live amongst the wildnesses and fastnesses of nature so often exhibit. One spot, where the common trenches on the civilised world, was scarcely less his admiration than mine. It is a high hill, halfcovered with furze, and heath, and broom, and sinking abruptly down to a large pond, almost a lake, covered with wild water-fowl. The ground, richly clothed with wood-oak, and beech, and elm,-rises on the other side with equal abruptness, as if shutting in those glassy waters from all but the sky, which shines so brightly in their clear bosom ; and yet in the bottom peeps a small, sheltered farm, whose wreaths of light smoke, and the white, glancing wings of the wild ducks, as they flit across the lake, are all that give token of motion or of life. I have stood there in utter oblivion of greyhound or of hare till moments have stretched to minutes, and minutes to hours; and so has Tom, conveying, by his exclamations of delight at its "pleasantness," exactly the same feeling which a poet or a painter (for it breathes the very spirit of calm and sunshiny beauty that a master-painter loves) would express by different but not truer praise. He called his own home "pleasant" too; and there, though one loves to

hear any house so called-there, I must confess, that favourite phrase, which I like almost as well as they who have no other, did seem rather misapplied. And yet it was finely placed-very finely. It stood in a sort of defile, where a road almost perpendicular wound from the top of a steep, abrupt hill, crowned with a tuft of old Scottish firs, into a dingle of fern and wild brushwood. A shallow, sullen stream oozed from the bank on one side, and, after forming a rude channel across the road, sank into a dark, deep pool, half-hidden among the sallows. Behind these sallows, in a nook between them and the hill, rose the uncouth and shapeless cottage of Tom Cordery. It is a scene which hangs upon the eye and the memory, striking, grand, almost sublime, and, above all, eminently foreign. No English painter would choose such a subject for an English landscape; no one in a picture would take it for English. It might pass for one of those scenes which have furnished models to Salvator Rosa. Tom's cottage was, however, very thoroughly national and characteristic ; a low, ruinous hovel, the door of which was fastened with a sedulous attention to security, that contrasted strangely with the tattered thatch of the roof and the half broken windows. No garden, no pig-sty, no pens for geese, none of the usual signs of cottage habitation; yet the house was covered with nondescript dwellings, and the very walls were animate with their extraordinary tenants; pheasants, partridges, rabbits, tame wild-ducks, halftame hares, and their enemies by nature and education, the ferrets, terriers, and mongrels, of whom his retinue consisted. Great ingenuity had been evinced in keeping separate these jarring elements; and by dint of hutches, cages, fences, kennels, and half a dozen little hurdled enclosures, resembling the sort of courts which children are apt to build round their cardhouses, peace was in general tolerably well preserved. Frequent sounds, however, of fear or of anger, as their several instincts were aroused, gave tokens that it was but a forced and hollow truce, and at such times the clamour was prodigious. Tom had the remarkable tenderness for animals when domesticated which is so often found in those whose sole vocation seems to be their destruction in the field; and the one long, straggling, unceiled, barn-like room, which served for kitchen, bed-chamber, and hall, was cumbered with bipeds and quadrupeds of all kinds and descriptions, the sick, the delicate, the newly-caught, the lying-in. In the midst of this menagerie sat Tom's wife (for he was married, though without a family