previous illness, he was summarily condemned as mad; and the general
pursuit commenced, which brought all parties (hunters and game) sweeping
so wildly past the quiet grounds of Greenhay. The sequel of the affair
was this: none of the carabineers succeeded in getting a shot at the dog;
in consequence of which, the chase lasted for 17 miles nominally; but,
allowing for all the doublings and headings back of the dog, by
computation for about 24; and finally, in a state of utter exhaustion, he
was run into and killed, somewhere in Cheshire. Of the two horses whom he
had bitten, both treated alike, one died in a state of furious
hydrophobia some two months later, but the other (though the more
seriously wounded of the two) manifested no symptoms whatever of
constitutional derangement. And thus it happened that for me this general
event of separation from my eldest brother, and the particular morning on
which it occurred, were each for itself separately and equally memorable.
Freedom won, and death escaped, almost in the same hour,--freedom from a
yoke of such secret and fretful annoyance as none could measure but
myself, and death probably through the fiercest of torments,--these
double cases of deliverance, so sudden and so _unlooked for_, signalized
by what heraldically might have been described as a two-headed memorial,
the establishment of an _epoch_ in my life. Not only was the chapter of
INFANCY thus solemnly finished forever, and the record closed, but--which
cannot often happen--the chapter was closed pompously and conspicuously
by what the early printers through the 15th and 16th centuries would have
called a bright and illuminated colophon.


FOOTNOTES

[1] "_Peculiar_."--Viz., as _endowed_ foundations to which those resort
who are rich and pay, and those also who, being poor, cannot pay, or