“But I am ignorant of everything,” said Cashel; “I only arrived here a little after daybreak, and, not caring to sleep, I strolled out, when my good fortune threw me into your way.”
“Your friends are likely to have fine weather, and I am glad of it,” said Corrigan. “This country, pretty enough in sunshine, looks bleak and dreary when the sky is lowering; but I 've no doubt you'd rather have
'A southerly wind and a cloudy sky,'
as the song says, than the brightest morning that ever welcomed a lark. Are you fond of hunting?”
“I like every kind of sport where horse, or gun, or hound can enter; but I 've seen most of such pastimes in distant countries, where the game is different from here, and the character of the people just as unlike.”
“'I have hunted the wild boar myself,” said old Corrigan, proudly, “in the royal forests at Meudon and Fontainebleau.”
“I speak of the antelope and the jaguar, the dark leopard of Guiana, or the brown bison of the Andes.”
“That is indeed a manly pastime!” said Mary, enthusiastically.
“It is so,” said Cashel, warmed by the encouragement of her remark, “more even for the endurance and persevering energy it demands than for its peril. The long days of toil in search of game, the nights of waking watchfulness, and then the strange characters and adventures among which you are thrown, all make up a kind of life so unlike the daily world.”
“There is, as you say, something highly exciting in all that,” said Corrigan; “but, to my thinking, hunting is a royal pastime, and loses half of its prestige when deprived of the pomp and circumstance of its courtly following. When I think of the old forest echoing to the tantarara of the cor de chasse, the scarlet-clad piqueurs with lance and cutlass, the train of courtiers mounted on their high-mettled steeds, displaying all the address of the salon, and all the skill of the chase, to him who was the centre of the group,—the king himself—”