In the clear starlight there stood the deer--a dozen of them, a clan of stags alone--with their antlers clashing like a clash of swords, and waving like swaying banners as they tossed their heads and listened.[*] [*] Let me here take leave to beg pardon of the gallant Highland stags for comparing them one instant with the shabby, miserable-looking wretches that travesty them in Richmond Park.

After seeing these latter scrubby, meager apologies for deer, one wonders why something better cannot be turned loose there.

A hunting-mare I know well nevertheless flattered them thus by racing them through the park: when in harness herself, to her own great disgust.
In an instant the hunter pricked his ears, snuffed the air, and twitched with passionate impatience at his bit; another instant and he had got his head, and, launching into a sweeping gallop, rushed down the glade.
Cecil sprang forward from his lazy rest, and seized the ribbons that in one instant had cut his companion's gloves to stripes.
"Sit still," he said calmly, but under his breath.

"He had been always ridden with the Buckhounds; he will race the deer as sure as we live!" Race the deer he did.
Startled, and fresh for their favorite nightly wandering, the stags were off like the wind at the noise of alarm, and the horses tore after them; no skill, no strength, no science could avail to pull them in; they had taken their bits between their teeth, and the devil that was in Maraschino lent the contagion of sympathy to the young carriage mare, who had never gone at such a pace since she had been first put in her break.
Neither Cecil's hands nor any other force could stop them now; on they went, hunting as straight in line as though staghounds streamed in front of them, and no phaeton rocked and swayed in a dead and dragging weight behind them.

In a moment he gauged the closeness and the vastness of the peril; there was nothing for it but to trust to chance, to keep his grasp on the reins to the last, and to watch for the first sign of exhaustion.