And the Quhair burn singing on its way down to the Tweed."
The red deer love this quiet glen. You may see their sharp footprints along every woodman's path, and by the oozy marge of every stream. Their hour is not yet. Like the fox and the badger, they are lovers of the twilight. It is not till evening darkens that they leave their lairs in the cool depths of the larch copse or the shadowy heart of the oak plantation, and cross the high dyke that parts the farm lands from the cover, and sally out to raid the young corn and the turnips in outlying fields. This is the Red Deer Country. Empty as the landscape is at noon, there are times when this wild heath is all alive with moving figures, horse and hound, and all the bravery of the shouting chase. Many a time has the hunt swept past this solitary tumulus, the gallant stag seen for a moment, perhaps, upon the sky line, as
"With anxious eye he wandered o'er
Mountain and meadow, moss and moor."
There is no hamlet for miles around but has its legends, old and new, of a sport that is dear to all the country side. In one of the moorland churches it is recorded how, some six hundred years since, a villager slew one of the King's deer; how the culprit was "not found," and how, in the end, four neighbouring parishes paid fine to the royal foresters. It is but a mile as the crow flies to a hamlet, lying deep in a hollow of the hills, where last year, when the chase went thundering through the quiet street, the stag, in his despair, sought refuge in the inn, and was pulled down by the hounds within the doorway of the hostelry. It is the most picturesque of inns, with its rambling buildings, its thatched roofs, mossed and lichen stained, its tiny dormer windows, and a sign that has puzzled many an idler on the village green;—uncertain whether, as some would have it, the figure in scarlet is meant for a woman seated on a stile; whether it is a nabob mounted on an elephant; or whether, as the words that run above it would suggest, it is a Roundhead trooper drawing rein under the oak of Boscobel.
