Underbrush most likely. You can always tell words you don't
know by the sense of the whole thing. Go on."
And stretching forward, free and far,
The child's voice took up the chant again. She read faster and faster as
it got more exciting. Uncle Henry joined in on
For, jaded now and spent with toil,
Embossed with foam and dark with soil,
While every gasp with sobs he drew,
The laboring stag strained full in view.
The little girl's heart beat fast. She fled along through the next
lines, stumbling desperately over the hard words but seeing the headlong
chase through them clearly as through tree-trunks in a forest. Uncle
Henry broke in in a triumphant shout:
The wily quarry shunned the shock
And TURNED him from the opposing rock;
Then dashing down a darksome glen,
Soon lost to hound and hunter's ken,
In the deep Trossach's wildest nook
His solitary refuge took.
"Oh MY!" cried Elizabeth Ann, laying down the book. "He got away, didn't
he? I was so afraid he wouldn't!"
"I can just hear those dogs yelping, can't you?" said Uncle Henry.
Yelled on the view the opening pack.
"Sometimes you hear 'em that way up on the slope of Hemlock Mountain
back of us, when they get to running a deer."
"What say we have some pop-corn!" suggested Aunt Abigail. "Betsy, don't
you want to pop us some?"
"I never DID," said the little girl, but in a less doubtful tone than
she had ever used with that phrase so familiar to her.
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