Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 33

546 FOREST NOTES.
turning vanes into the wind and sun. Tliere is a glad spring bustle in
the air perhaps, and the lilacs are all in flower, and the creepers green
about the broken balustrade; but no spring shall revive the honour of
the place. Old women of the people, little children of the people, saunter
and gambol in the walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected moat.
Plough horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long stables. The dial-hand
on the clock waits for some better hour. Out on the plain, where hot sweat
trickles into men's eyes and the spade goes in deep and comes up slowly,
perhaps the peasant may feel a movement of joy at his heart, when he
thinks that these spacious chimneys are now "Cold which have so often
l)lazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper, while he and his hollow-eyed
children watched through the night with empty bellies and cold feet. And
perhaps, as he raises his head and sees the forest lying like a coast-line of
low hills along the sea-like level of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau
hold no unsimilar place in his afiections. If the chateau was my lord's, the
forest was my lord the king's ; neither of them for this poor Jacques.
If he thought to eke out his meagre way of life by some petty theft of
wood for the fire, or for a new roof-tree, he found himself face to face
with a whole department from the Grand Master of the AVoods and
Waters, who was a high-ljorn lord, down to the common sergeant, who
was a peasant like himself, and wore stripes or a bandoleer by way of
uniform. For the first offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of
fifteen sols ; and should a man be taken more than once in fault, or cir-
cumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he might be whipped,
branded, or hanged. There was a hangman over at Melun, and I doubt
not a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where Jacques might see his
fellows dangle against the sky as he went to market.
And then, if he lived near so great a cover, there would be the more
hares and rabbits to eat out his harvest and the more hunters to trample
it down. My lord has a new horn from England. He has laid out seven
francs in decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting it with a silken leash
to hang abo\it his shoulder. The hounds have been on a pilgrimage to the
shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert in the Ardennes, or some other
holy intercessor who has made a specialty of the health of hunting dogs.
In the grey dawn, the game was turned and the branch broken by our
best piqueur. A rare day's hunting is before us. "Wind a jolly flourish,
sound the bien-allei- with all your lungs ! Jacques must stand by, hat in
hand, while quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across his field, and
a year's sparing and laboui'ing is as though it had not been. If he can
see the I'uin with a good enough grace, who knows but he may fall in
favour with my lord ; who knows but his sou may become the last and
least among the servants at his lordship's kennel — one of the two poor
varlets who get no wages, and sleep at night among the hounds 1 *
* " Deiix poures varlez qui n'ont milz gages et qui gissoient la nuit avec les chiens."
See Champollion-Figeac's Louis et Charles d' Orleans, I. 63. And for my lord's English
horn, Ibid. 96.