The Stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
she began, and it was as though she had stepped into a boat and was
swept off by a strong current. She did not know what all the words
meant, and she could not pronounce a good many of the names, but nobody
interrupted to correct her, and she read on and on, steadied by the
strongly-marked rhythm, drawn forward swiftly from one clanging,
sonorous rhyme to another. Uncle Henry nodded his head in time to the
rise and fall of her voice and now and then stopped his work to look at
her with bright, eager, old eyes. He knew some of the places by heart
evidently, for once in a while his voice would join the little girl's
for a couplet or two. They chanted together thus:
A moment listened to the cry
That thickened as the chase drew nigh,
Then, as the headmost foes appeared,
With one brave bound, the copse he cleared.
At the last line Uncle Henry flung his arm out wide, and the child felt
as though the deer had made his great leap there, before her eyes.
"I've seen 'em jump just like that," broke in Uncle Henry. "A two-three-
hundred-pound stag go up over a four-foot fence just like a piece of
thistledown in the wind."
"Uncle Henry," asked Elizabeth Ann, "what is a copse?"
"I don't know," said Uncle Henry indifferently. "Something in the woods,
must be.
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