THE DEER STEALERS.
The Lucy family we have already had occasion to notice as descended from an ancient and honourable house. They might indeed say with Christopher Sly—"We came in with Richard Conqueror," since they have in truth, occupied an important position in England for many centuries.
The mansion of Charlecote, at the period of our story, stood in the midst of a park or chase much greater in extent than at the present time.
The ground plan of the building forms in shape the Roman capital letter E, perhaps in compliment to the virgin Queen, with whose arms it is decorated. The soft and gentle Avon gliding at the base, and the park, which immediately surrounded the building, was shadowed by oaks of great age, which gradually gave place to brake and thicket, almost impenetrable in some parts to aught save the hound or the game he followed. This again was relieved at intervals by open spaces of great beauty, in which the fern grew in wild luxuriance, and hundreds of brood short-stemmed oaks, at distant intervals, threw their huge branches over the green surface, as if rejoicing in their unconfined luxuriance. In such spots, so bright and fresh in the pale light of the moon, the fern decked with liquid dew, and the branches of the trees glittering with bright drops, the fairies might well be imagined to hold their sequestered revels.
Every glade and bosky bourne, every tree and fern-clad undulation, was a scene peculiarly adapted to the elfin and the fay. They seemed to tell, in their sweetness, and their unmolested seclusion, of the innocent ages of an early world, when faun and satyr, and nymph and dryad, revelled in the open glade, or reposed on the mossed bank beneath the sheltering boughs.
Stealthily, and with the utmost caution, not a word even whispered, but communicating to each other by signs as they advanced, young Shakespeare and Diccon Snare slowly emerged from the more thick cover upon one of these picturesque glades, and took their stand behind a huge oak—
"An oak whose boughs were moss'd with age,
And big top bald with dry antiquity."
"We near the herd," said Shakespeare, in a gentle whisper to his companion.
"We do so," said Snare, "a few yards more and we shall get within shot, thanks to our care in gaming the wind, and, look, ye, there they be! You can just see their antlered heads above the long white grass in yonder open space."
"We must be wary in our approach," said Shakespeare, in a whisper; "tread softly, that the blind mole may not hear a footfall."