The Squire of Trengwainton had breakfasted by candlelight, and as the clock over the stables was striking half-past six, he mounted his favourite grey mare and started out attired in full hunting costume, green coat, white breeches, boots reaching almost to the knee, and a velvet cap that well became his clean-shaven face. Twelve couple of hounds followed at his horse’s heels, the little procession as it made its way along the avenue of beeches being closed by Sam Noy, the whipper-in.
Coming to the high ground beyond the Forest Carn where the track forks, the squire turned in his saddle and asked which road he should take.
“The lower road, Sir Tudor,” was the prompt reply. Strange though it seems that the Squire of Trengwainton should ask his way to the meet, the explanation is simple.
He had arrived in Cornwall from Pembroke only three weeks earlier, after a voyage exciting even for those disturbed times. The schooner in which he sailed was attacked off the Land’s End by a privateer which had been harassing St Ives, and compelled to run before the wind in order to escape capture. Under cover of darkness she got away, and reached St Ives with no more damage than a hole in her mainsail and the loss of her topmast. But the mayor and the watch mistaking the rakish-looking craft for another Frenchman, had opened fire from the three four-pounders on the “Island”—luckily without effect, the balls dropping at least fifty yards short.
The incident had so greatly amused the squire that the very memory of it brought a smile to his face again and again as he rode through the grey dawn. By and by the sun rose, making a jewel of every dewdrop, and calling forth the carols of the birds.
This changed the train of his thoughts. His mind reverted to Gaston de Foix, of all followers of the chase the one dearest to his heart, and after passing the farmhouse at Lanyon as he descended the hill to the millpool he was quoting aloud: “Et quant le soleil sera levé, il verra celle douce rosée sur rincelles et herbettes et le soleil par sa vertu les fera reluysir. C’est grant plaisance et joye au cœur du veneur.”
“We turn in here, sir,” presently interposed the whipper-in, who thought the squire had taken leave of his seven senses.
“Four Parishes, where the meet is, lies right afore ’ee under the Galver, and the Galver is that git hill up again’ the sky theere.”
Whereupon Sir Tudor left the track for the moor lined with the shadows of the Carns.
Awaiting him at Four Parishes[[9]] were Squire Tregenna, to whose gun-fire he had been exposed in St Ives Bay, Squire Praed of Trevethoe, a few yeomen, some crofters for the most part fairly mounted, and a promiscuous crowd of men afoot, amongst whom the fiddler’s pinched face peeped out between the rough beards of two tall smugglers, and three or four ne’er-do-wells were marked off by their careless slouch from the sturdier forms of half a dozen miners.