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Castle Dangerous; And the Surgeon's Daughter
Castle Dangerous And the Surgeon's Daughter Author:Sir Walter Scott General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1905 Original Publisher: Nelson Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select f... more »rom more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER VII. The drivers through the wood went, For to raise the deer ; Bowmen bickered upon the bent, With their broad arrows clear. The wylde through the woods went, On every side shear ; Greyhounds through the groves glent, For to kill their deer. Ballad of Chevy Chase, Old Edit. The appointed morning came in cold and raw, after the manner of the Scottish March weather. Dogs yelped, yawned, and shivered; and the huntsmen, though hardy and cheerful in expectation of the day's sport, twitched their mauds, or Lowland plaids, close to their throats, and looked with some dismay at the mists which floated about the horizon, now threatening to sink down on the peaks and ridges of prominent mountains, and now to shift their position under the influence of some of the uncertain gales, which rose and fell alternately as they swept along the valley. Nevertheless the appearance of the whole formed, as is usual in almost all departments of the chase, a gay and a jovial spectacle. A brief trace seemed to have taken place between the nations, and the Scottish people appeared for the time rather as exhibiting the sports of their mountains in a friendly manner to the accomplished knights and bonny archers of Old England, than as performing a feudal service, neither easy nor dignified in itself, at the instigation of usurping neighbours. The figures of the cavaliers, now half seen, now exhibited fully, and at the height of strenuous exertion, according to the character of the dangerous and broken ground, particularly attracted the attention of the pedestrians, who, leading th...« less