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"My father, it is my father!" cried Anna, as she hastened to the door of the adjoining room, which, as we know, contained the ancestral portraits of the Prickers. Pollnitz followed her. In this room, surrounded by his ancestors, the worthy tailor lay upon his death-bed. Pale and colorless as the portraits was the face of the poor man; but his eyes were gleaming with a wild, feverish glitter.
On his arrival in Newcastle they sent the bellman through the town inviting every one to make complaints. In this business-like way they collected thirty women at the town hall, stripped them, and put them to the pricking test. This cruel, not to say indelicate, process was carried on with additions that must have proved highly diverting to the base-minded prickers and onlookers.
He found two marks of the devil's making; for she could not feel the pin when it was put into either of the said marks, nor did the marks bleed when the pin was taken out again. When she was asked where she thought the pins were put in her, she pointed to a part of her body distant from the real place. These common prickers became at last so numerous, that they were considered nuisances.
Here were also in attendance many yeomen prickers, with gallant horses and noble dogs, on which Quentin looked with such inquisitive delight that his uncle was obliged more than once to remind him that the animals were not there for his private amusement, but for the King's, who had a strong passion for the chase, one of the few inclinations which he indulged even when coming in competition with his course of policy; being so strict a protector of the game in the royal forests that it was currently said you might kill a man with greater impunity than a stag.
The prickers on foot at the doors held the dogs in leash; and at the sound of the horn scores of young nobles mounted, and all set out to the place of meeting.
Even the Hohenzollerns had forgotten the great deeds and still greater services of the Prickers, and no longer knew how to reward true merit. Since Pelissier took the opposite house, Pricker's heart was broken; night and day he was consumed with anguish; but he made no complaint, he suffered in Spartan silence, and like a hero covered his bleeding wounds.
The distance was, however, considerable, and before reaching it they had another alarm. The prickers, who rode foremost in the troop, halted and announced to the Lord Boteler, that they perceived advancing towards them a body of armed men.
Three greyhounds were slipped upon him, whom he threw out, after running a couple of miles, by entering an extensive furzy brake which extended along the side of a hill. The horsemen soon came up, and casting off a sufficient number of slowhounds, sent them, with the prickers, into the cover, in order to chive the game from his strength.
He mounted, indeed, but kept apart and well behind Mette and her brisk group of wooers. For, apart from his lack of inclination, his horse was not yet recovered; and by and by, as the prickers started a deer, the hunt swept ahead of him and left him riding alone. "For I am tired of this hunting," she told him, as she came near. "And you? Does it weary you also, that you lag so far behind?"
He leaped over a cactus, attempted another, and, failing, fell on the sharp prickers. He bleated in distress and scrambled out of that hard and painful place. The mother came around, and presently, reunited, they went on, to disappear. The island seemed consecrated to sun and sea. It lay out of the latitude of ships.
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