“Who the Devil are you?” shouted he, as he drove right at us.  “Two Indians, ha!—­somebody said it was one Indian with a moose after him, a man and a moose.  Where’s Thurlow?—­he had the telescope, and asserted there was a man running round the target and a moose after him.  I don’t see the moose.”  Zach had dropped the hide and horns from his “recreant limbs,” and was seated solemnly upon the snow, in all the majesty of his native dirt.

“By Jove, it’s Kennedy!” cried Tankerville, whose artistical eye detected me through my hirsute and fluttering disguise.  “What a picturesque object!—­I congratulate you, old fellow!—­easiest and pleasantest way in the world of making a living!—­lose no time about it, but send in your papers at once!—­continue assiduously to neglect your person, and you’re worth a guinea an hour for the rest of your prime, as a living model on the full pay of the Academies!”

I was soon bewildered by a torrent of inquiries from all sides:  as to how I came behind the target,—­what success I had had in the woods,—­how many miles I had come to-day,—­whether I had got the martin-skin I had promised to this one, and the silver fox I undertook to trap for that,—­when, suddenly, a diversion was created by a roar from Phillips, who had proceeded to inspect my spoils behind the target, and now stood looking at my portrait-gallery of living celebrities, his great chest heaving with laughter; and before I could satisfy my inquiring friends, the whole crowd had rushed pell-mell to the exhibition.

“Caught, by all that’s lovely!” shouted Phillips, repeating my verses at the top of his voice,—­

  “The bird-song and flower
    And star from above
  Combine in thy bower;
    Their union is love!”

“Ritoorala loorala loorala loo, ritoorala loorala loorala loo!” chorused everybody, as he sang the last verse to the vulgar melody of ’Tatter Jack Welch,’ knocking the poetry out of my constitution at once and forever, like the ashes out of a pipe.  “Hooray for Miss Mac!  Who should have thought it, Darby?”—­That was my pet name in the regiment.

“How like!—­how very like!—­That’s Warren there, nibbling the turnip.  And there’s Thurlow,—­ha! ha! ha! how good!  And that—­that—­that’s me, by Jingo!—­he he! he! he!—­not so good that, somehow,—­neck too long by half a foot.  But the Colonel!—­only look at his boots!—­He must’n’t see this, though, by Jove!—­Choke the Colonel off, boys!—­take him round to the front!—­do something!” whispered good-natured Symonds, anxious to keep me clear of the scrape.

But it was too late.  The last objects that met my view were the ghastly legs of the Commandant, as he strode through the circle in front of my Art-exhibition.  I saw no more.  A soldier is but a mortal man.  Rushing to the nearest cariole,—­it was the Commandant’s,—­I leaped into it, and, lashing the horse furiously towards the town, never pulled rein until I got up to my long-deserted