the hills, munching my crust thankfully in a sunny opening of the
woods, with a brook's music tinkling among the mossy stones at my
feet, and the gorgeous crimson and green and gold of the hillside
stretching down and away, like a vast Oriental rug of a giant's
weaving, to the flash and blue gleam of the distant sea. And
everywhere--Nature's last subtle touches to her picture--the
sense of a filmy veil let down ere the end was reached, a soft
haze on the glowing hilltops, a sheen as of silver mist along the
stream in the valley, a fleecy light-shot cloud on the sea, to
suggest more, and more beautiful, beyond the veil.

Evening found me hurrying homeward through the short twilight,
along silent wood roads from which the birds had departed,
breathing deep of the pure air with its pungent tang of ripened
leaves, sniffing the first night smells, listening now for the
yap of a fox, now for the distant bay of a dog to guide me in a
short cut over the hills to where my room in the old farmhouse
was waiting.

It mattered little that, far behind me (though not so far from
where the trail ended), the big buck began his twilight wandering
along the ridges, sniffing alertly at the vanishing scent of the
man on his feeding ground. The best things that a hunter brings
home are in his heart, not in his game bag; and a free deer meant
another long glorious day following him through the October
woods, making the tyro's mistakes, to be sure, but feeling also
the tyro's thrill and the tyro's wonder, and the consciousness of
growing power and skill to read in a new language the secrets
that the moss and leaves hide so innocently.