Lays of the Deer Forest, with Sketches of Olden and Modern Deer Hunting, &c. &c. By John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart. 2 vols., post 8vo. William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London.

We would that, like stout Lord Percy of yore, it were in our power at this present moment to chronicle a vow that we should forthwith take our pastime for three summer days on the pleasant hills of Scotland. Alas for us, that we are doomed, from divers causes, to absent ourselves from felicity awhile, and, amidst the heat and noise of London, listen with intense disgust to the brutal bayings of the Chartists! This very night, we hear, the ignoble hunt is to be up in Bishop Bonner's fields. Crowds of dirty, unshaven, squalid ruffians, who have not the strength to use the pike, but the will to employ the knife of the assassin—fellows whom even Cobden would be chary to recognise as his quondam supporters, defenders, and dupes—not unmingled with foreign propagandists, whom even France, in the fury of her revolutionary tornado, repudiates—are thronging to the place of rendezvous, where, doubtless, their souls will be worthily regaled by the ravings of some rascally vendors of sedition, blasphemy, and treason. Then will ensue the usual scene which for nights has disgraced the metropolis. Some unfortunate tradesman, whose curiosity has been stronger than his prudence, will be fixed upon as a "special" or a spy—the cowards, presuming upon their numbers, and the apparent absence of all executive power, will attempt a deliberate murder—the police will sally from their hiding-place to the rescue—there will be a storm of brickbats, a determined charge with the baton, a shop or two will be gutted, some score of craniums cracked, and to-morrow morning the greasy patriots, at the bar of Bow Street, will read their recantation, and, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, protest their loyalty to the Queen. Such are the pastimes of merry England in the month of June, and such the results of that enlightened policy which yields every thing to popular clamour, adopts the most fatal delusions as distinct principles of right, and then shrinks, trembling and aghast, from the inevitable result of their development!

We do not want—in this article, at least—to be political, and we vow that we took up our pen three minutes ago in a spirit of perfect good-will and harmony towards all manner of men. But the hoarse bawling of these cannibals has somewhat ruffled our temper, dispelled for the moment our dreams of the mountains, and forced us back to the sterner realities of popular tumult and the truncheon. If this sort of thing lasts, we shall indubitably emigrate. Assassination, as recommended by the modern Hamilcar, is by no manner of means to our taste. Our opinion coincides with that of the gracious Captain of Knockdunder, and, were we promoted to a judicial function, "the chiel they ca' the Fustler" should ere long fustle in a tow. Neither are we at all disposed to fraternise with the milder Cuffey—a fellow, by the way, who is not without some redeeming scintillations of humour. We have no wish to be introduced to him even at a mesmeric soiree; and, acting upon the principle of Jacquey, we shall pray heaven to decrease our acquaintance, and put the Tweed as speedily as possible between ourselves and the partisans of O'Connor. We hope the Lord Provost, though discomfited in his Police Bill, has been looking after the tranquillity of the Calton. If not, we must move further north, and finally locate ourselves somewhere in the vicinity of Dalnacardoch. The deuce is in it, if the revolutionary mania has penetrated to that sequestred region! No son of the mountains has ever yet given in his adhesion to the Charter—treason hath not stained the tartan, and no republican pins have ever been exposed beneath the checkered margin of the kilt. There is loyalty at least in the land which was traversed by Montrose and Dundee; and without the slightest fear that any of the numerous points of that interesting but incomprehensible public document, which Mr Joseph Hume proposes to condense, shall be unduly obtruded on our notice, we shall at once exchange our London dwelling for the more pleasant bothy of the hills.

As for a companion, we shall seek none better—for we could not find one—than this last publication of the Stuarts. And here, once for all, let us draw a line of distinction betwixt the poetry and the prose of these very remarkable brothers. We have not the remotest intention of sitting in judgment on the "Lays," or of testing the poetical merits of John Sobieski and Charles Edward, either by the canons of Longinus, or by that superior code of literary laws which Maga has promulgated to the world. The poems, which occupy exclusively the first of these volumes, are, with one exception, fugitive in their nature, and appear to have been penned rather from occasional impulse, than from any deliberate intention of publication. Accordingly, we find that most of them relate to topics personal to the authors themselves—and with these we do not meddle. In others, there are flashes of the deep national spirit which still survives—though our rulers do not seem to mark it—in Scotland: indignation at the neglect with which too many of our national institutions have been treated, and mournful lamentings over the misfortunes of a former age. But the impulse which leads to the composition of poetry does not always imply its accomplishment. Poetry, as an art in which excellence can only be obtained by a combination of the simple and the sublime, requires a study far more intense and serious than the mere critic is apt to allow. In a former Number we devoted an article to an exposition of those principles, which are absolutely invariable in their application, and which must be thoroughly understood, if they are not intuitive to the poet; and, being in no mood for repetition, we shall simply say that we adhere to our recorded doctrines. The Stuarts, it must be confessed, are more successful with the rifle than the lyre. We would far rather meet them in the garb of the forester, than in the more fantastic fashion of the minstrel: be theirs the lot of Ryno the hunter, not the darkened destiny of the bard.

Do, therefore, what you please with the first volume—pack it up in your portmanteau, or place it on the shelf beside Chambers' History and the collections of good old Bishop Forbes. But if you profess to be a deer-stalker—though we fear your profession to be false—or if you are but an aspiring neophyte, and hankerer after that proud position—or if you merely bound your aspirations towards the compassing of the death of a roebuck—or if simply you have a keen and a kindly eye for nature, and are a lover of the sylvan solitudes—in one or other, or all of these characters, we pray you to deal more leisurely with the other tone, which is the Hunter's Vade-Mecum, the best guide ever yet published to the haunts of the antlered monarch.

We are fond of Mr Scrope, and we have an excessive partiality for St John. Two finer fellows never shouldered a rifle; and our conscience does not accuse us of having used too superlative, in epithet in their praise. This was the more creditable on our part, because we knew them both to be Southrons; and while freely admitting the sportsman-like qualities of the one, and the strong picturesque style and spirit of the other, we felt a slight, passing, but pardonable pang of jealousy, that they should have stepped in, and pre-occupied the native field. Where, thought we, are our Scottish deer-stalkers? Can the lads not handle a pen as well as touch a trigger? Will none of them, who have been trained to the hills since they were striplings, stand forth for the honour of Albyn, and try a match with these fustian-coated circumventers of the stag? By the shade of Domhnull Mac-Fhionnlaidlhnan Dan, we blush for the literary reputation of our country, and almost wish that we were young enough ourselves to take the hill against the invading Sassenach! At length—and we are delighted to see it—the reproach has been swept away. Two stalwart champions of the forest have risen in the persons of the Stuarts—they have encountered the Englishmen with their own weapons, and, in our opinion, beaten them hollow.

Mr Scrope had the merit of producing the earliest work in which deer-stalking was treated as a distinct and peculiar branch of the art venatory. We speak of it now from recollection; for our copy, somewhat frayed and worn by the fingers of ambitious sportsmen, is in the snug corner of a library some hundred miles to the northward. But we remember well the Waltonian character of the book—the professional style in which the elder practitioner enforced his precepts upon the dawning intellect of his companion; and the adventures, neither few nor feeble, which were depicted in the heart of the Atholl forest. Taken as the production of an English sportsman, Mr Scrope's book is highly creditable: considered as the manual of a deer-stalker, it is at the best indifferent. Nor, indeed, could it well be otherwise. Not until middle age, if we are informed rightly, did Mr Scrope first send a ball into the ample shoulder of a hart: his young blood never beat tumultuously in his veins at the sight of the mighty creature rolling over upon the heather, and its antlers buried in the moss. His boyish enthusiasm, we fear, was expended upon game of less mark and likelihood—partridges, perchance, as they whirred from the turnips, or possibly he was "entered" with the hare. Wordsworth's maxim, that the boy is the father of the man, is peculiarly applicable in sporting matters. Upon the character of the country in which the latent spirit of the hunter is earliest developed, depends, in a great degree, his future success, and certainly his accomplishment as an Orion. The young squire, who has been brought up in the faith of Sykes, who never stirs abroad without a keeper, and who is accustomed to see his delicate pointers execute their manoeuvres with almost mathematical precision on the flat stubbles of Norfolk, labours under a huge disadvantage in the higher branches of his science, compared with the Highland boy who has received his education on the hill. What though the single barrel of the latter be a clumsy implement indeed in competition with the Purdie which decorates the shoulder of the former—though the hound that sometimes attends him, though oftener he is alone, never slept a single night in a kennel, and is the ruggedest specimen of his kind—still he is in the enjoyment of advantages incomparably superior for the development of all his faculties, and the sharpening of every sense. The triumph of the sportsman does not lie so much in the killing as in the finding of his game. Were it otherwise, the pigeon-slayer of Battersea or the Red-house would have just claims to the honours of Sir Tristram, and the annihilator of poultry to rank with the Nimrods of the world. Our young friend the Squire shoots well—that is to say, he can kill with reasonable precision: but, after all, what is he save an instrument? Take Ponto away from him, tie up Juno, send a bullet through the brain of Basta, and a pretty beggarly account you will have of it in the evening when we come to the emptying of the bags! Or lead him down to the sea-shore, and show him a whaup, which in the English tongue is denominated a curlew; request him to use all his possible skill to compass possession of the bird; but do not set your heart on having it, else, as sure as fate, you are doomed to disappointment. Whaup is quite alive to his own interests, and by no means unsuspicious of the Saxon, who advances straight towards him with a hypocritical air of unconcern. Had the Highland lad been there, what a difference! He would have dropped like a stone behind that rock, wriggled like a serpent over the sand, kept the bird between himself and the sea, taken advantage of every inequality in the ground, discerned from the attitude of his quarry whether its suspicions were aroused or not, and in ten minutes a pluff of white smoke and a report would have announced its extermination. As it is, the curlew remains apparently unconcerned until the Lord of the Manor has reduced the intermediate distance to a hundred and twenty yards, and then, with a shrill whistle, takes flight along the margin of the tide. Or set him to stalk a blackcock, perched high of an Autumn morning on a dyke. How clumsily he sets about it! how miserable is his stoop! how wretchedly he calculates his distance! That wide-awake hat, which, for the sake of symmetry, he has been pleased to surmount with a feather, is as conspicuous to the country for miles round, and of course to the blackcock, as was the white plume of Murat in the field of battle, and as potent to effect a clearance, of which we presently have ocular demonstration.

We contend, therefore, that it is extremely difficult for the man, be he ever so addicted to field-sports, who has been educated in a cultivated country, to disembarrass himself of the artificial habits which he is tolerably sure to acquire. His trolling may be excellent—indeed, English gentlemen are, generally speaking, first-rate shots—but he will be deficient in the science of the naturalist, and in that singular acuteness of perception which can hardly be gained save by an early intimacy with nature, on the mountain, the moor, or in the glen. No subsequent education or experience can make up for the normal deficiency, least of all in the pursuit of an animal so wary, so instinctive, and so peculiar in its habits as the deer. Of course we do not mean to deny that there is much which may be learned. What a pointer is to partridges, some wary and experienced forester may often be made to the deer; and if you put yourself under his tuition, and scrupulously obey his orders, you may very possibly succeed in attaining the object of your desires. Nor indeed can you do better, up to a certain point, notwithstanding the strictures of the Stuarts, who are, we think, unnecessarily wroth at the system which would call in the aid of any supplementary assistance. We hope no gentleman who has rented a forest for the ensuing season will be deterred from following the feet of a Highland Gamaliel on account of any ridicule which may be attached to the fact of his having been "taken up" to a deer. If he should rashly attempt stalking at his own hand, without any preliminary instruction, we should be sorry to found our hopes of dinner on the chance of his acquisition of a haunch.

"When advancing upon deer [say our authors]—except in strange ground—the forester, or any other attendant, should be left behind a stone, or in some covert, before the stalker commences his approach; not from any recognition of the false reproach made against the guides by Mr Scrope, but because there is no occasion for an assistant, and the action of one has more celerity, independence, and security from discovery, than when a greater number are in motion. The charge made by the author of 'The Art of Deer-stalking,' that the forester is often in the way, and sometimes obstructs the shot, is not true, unless in instances of inexperienced and awkward individuals, who are not to be found among that class of foresters of whom the guest of the Atholl Forest proposes his remarks. With a MacKenzie, or a MacDonald, a Catanach, and a MacHardie, the asserted inconvenience must proceed from the ignorance or maladroitness of the gray worm which crawls at his back, and who often does not know what he is doing, or where he is going, with his ideas ÉgarÉ on his sensitive knees and varnished Purdie, unconscious of what he ought to do and nervous for what he ought not, flurried with eagerness and disgusted with his posture, and who, never seeing a deer except once in the year, is led up to him like a 'blind burraid,' by one whose language he scarcely understands. In general, therefore, the embarrassments of the 'creep' are those of the superior, who is frequently so ignorant, unpractised, and dependent upon the guidance of the forester, that to be 'taken up to the deer' has become the modern forest phrase for the approach of the sportsman. This contemptible term, and its contemptible practice, has only been introduced within the last quarter century, since the prevalence of stalking gentlemen utterly unacquainted with the ground and pursuit of deer. Of old, the 'SeÀlgair uasal nam bÈann' was initiated to the hill when yet but a 'biorach' of a stalker; and when he became a matured hill-man, he should no more have suffered himself to be—'taken up to his deer' by an attendant, than a Melton fox-hunter to be trained after the hounds by a whipper-in with a leading rein.—What should have been the sentiments of the old chiefs and Uaislean of the last century—the Dukes of Atholl and Gordon—Glengarrie—John Aberardar—Iain dubh Bhail-a-ChroÄin—to hear a deer-hunter speak of being 'taken up to his deer!'—Certainly that he was a noble 'amadan' or 'gille-crÙbach,' who had not the faculties or the limbs to act for himself.—But this is only one of the many instances for which the hills of Gael may mourn with the mountains of Gilboa—'Quomodo ceciderunt robusti!'"

Far are we from insinuating that Mr Scrope is at all liable to the remarks contained in the foregoing extract. On the contrary, we hold him to be a man of vigorous mind and acute eye, and any thing but a contemptible foe to the stags, after the measure of his own experience. If he is deficient at all, it is in the poetry and higher mysteries of the art, which hardly would be expected from a stranger, whose initiation was necessarily late. Waverley, though a respectable shot, and a man of literary taste, would, we apprehend, have described the driving and disposition of the tainchel less effectively, and certainly far less truly, than Fergus M'Ivor; so great a difference is there betwixt the craft of the master and his pupil. Let Mr Scrope, therefore, rest content with the laurels he has won, and the trophies he has taken from the forest. Not unforgotten is his name in Atholl, nor unloved. Let him be a guide to the Southren, but he must not dream of rivalling the Stuarts in woodcraft, or Stoddart in the science of piscation.

Of Mr St John's "Wild Sports of the Highlands," we have already spoken in terms of unqualified praise. A more delightful volume was never adapted for the pocket of the sportsman: a more truthful or observant work has seldom issued from the pen of the naturalist. His sketches and pictures of deer-stalking we allow to be as perfect in their way as the compositions of Landseer; and having said so much, we shall not make any further call upon that gentleman's blushes. Still, even his experience is limited, and his knowledge imperfect. He has given us a brilliant account of his own exploits upon the hill, but he has not lived long enough in the wilder haunts of the deer accurately to understand their habits. Not so our authors, who for years have been denizens of the mountains, speaking the tongue of the Gael, wearing the native garb, and following the chase with an ardour and enthusiasm unparalleled in these degenerate days.

Gentlemen who complain of the inferior accommodation afforded by some of the more distant hostelries of Scotland—who are shocked at the absence of warming-pans, and tremulously nervous about your sanatory condition, when subjected to the enormity of damp sheets—how would you like to spend a few nights on the misty hill-side, or even in the hut of the hunters? We shall take you if you please to the latter spot, merely premising that, in order to reach it, we must cross the Findhorn, now roaring down in spate. A terrible stream is that Findhorn, as Mr St John well knows; but we question whether he ever ventured to ford it on the rise, as was done by one of the Stuarts. For the information of distant friends, we beg to put our imprimatur to the following description of this furious Highland flood, which rolled between the residence of the hunters and their favourite ground.

"That stream, however, which was so calm, and bright, and sunny, when the otters floated down its current in a still summer's morning, was a fierce and terrible enemy in its anger; and, for a great part of the year, the dread of its uncertainty and danger was a formidable cause for the preservation of that profound solitude of the forest which so long made it the sanctuary of deer, roe, and every kind of wild game. The rapidity with which the river comes down, the impassable height to which it rises in an incredibly short time, its incertitude and fury, would render it an object of care to bold forders and boatmen; but with the peasants of the 'laich,' unaccustomed, like the Highlanders, to wrestle with a mountain torrent, and, excepting in rare instances, unable to swim or manage a coble, it inspires a dread, almost amounting to awe, and none except ourselves ventured to keep a boat above the fishing-station of Slui. Pent within a channel of rocks from fifty to a hundred and eighty feet in height, the rise of the water is rapidly exaggerated by the incapability of diffusion; and the length of its course sometimes concealing beyond the horizon the storms by which it is swelled at its source, its floods then descend with unexpected violence. Frequently when, excepting a low wreath upon Beann-Drineachain, the sun is shining in a cloudless sky, and the water scarce ripples over the glittering ford, a deep hollow sound—a dull approaching roar may be heard in the gorges of the river; and almost before the wading fisherman can gain the shore, a bank of water, loaded with trees, and rocks, and wreck, will come down three—four—five feet abreast—sweeping all before it in a thunder of foam and ruin. In ordinary cases, after two days of rain, the stream will rise twenty or thirty feet—it has risen nearly ten fathoms in its rocky gulf; and once upon this occasion it mounted fifteen feet in a quarter of an hour. When the dawn broke, it appeared sweeping through the trees, which the evening before hung fifty feet above its brink—a black roaring tempest loaded with ruins and debris, from which were seen to rise at times the white skeletons of trees peeled of their bark, beams and couples of houses—a cart—a door—a cradle, hurrying and tilting through the foam and spray, like the scattered 'floatsome' of a wreck.

"It may be judged how far it was convenient in winter to hunt a forest separated by such a boundary, of which the nearest certain passage was by a bridge two miles to the west, with frequently the view of hunting three miles to the east. Often we have gone out in a clear sapphire morning, when there was scarce a ripple on the pools, and the water on the ford was not over our 'glunachan,' and when we returned at evening, and approached through the dark veil of pines which descended to the river, have heard a roar as if the world was rolling together down the black trough before us, and as we came out on the bank, found a furious tempest of water, tumbling, and plunging, and leaping, over stock and rock twenty feet upon the clatach, where we had left it whimpering among the pebbles in the morning; while, in the far, deep, birch-embowered channel, where the stream was then so still and placid that you could only guess its course by the bright glistening eye which here and there blinked between the trees and stones,—now it came yelling, and skirling, and clamouring down the rocks and falls, as if all the air was full of gibbering, babbling, laughing demons, who were muttering, and yammering, and prophesying, and hooting, at what you were going to do, if you attempted to cross."

We pray you at your leisure to read on, and you will presently see what peril our authors underwent at the fearful fords of the Findhorn. Once or twice in our life we have been in similar jeopardy, and we can testify with unction to the singular sensations which beset a man in the midst of a roaring river, when the rapids are shooting away below, and the boulder-stones rolling beneath his feet. We pass over some perilous instances of adventure, which at length became so frequent as to lead to the construction of the hut.

"Such continually and unexpectedly were the ferries of the Findhorn, and many such escapes we had, in daylight and in darkness.—Twice I have been swamped, often nearly upset, and more than once carried off my legs in the fords; and—I say it with humility, and always under the mercy of heaven—that I owed rescue either to actual swimming, or to the confidence inspired by that power when struggling with the strong and terrible enemy.

"This continual exposure to battle and disappointment, however, became at length too vexatious an abridgment of sport and certainty; and as I would—and often—have made my bed under a fir tree rather than go round by the bridge of Daltullich, I resolved upon another alternative—to build in the forest a 'bothan an t-sealgair,' or 'hunter's hut,' where we might lodge for the night when it was impossible to cross the water.

"There is a high and beautiful craig at the crook of the river near the 'Little Eas,'—a precipice eighty feet in height, and then like a vast stone helmet crowned with a feathery plume of wood, which nodded over its brow. From its top you might drop a bullet into the pool below, but on the south side there is an accessible woody bank, down which, by planting your heels firmly in the soil and among the roots of the trees, there is a descent to a deep but smooth and sandy ford. Upon the summit of the rock there is, or there was—my blessing upon it!—a thick and beautiful bird-cherry, which hung over the craig, and whose pendant branches, taking root on the edge of the steep, shot up again like the banana, and formed a natural arbour and close trellis along the margin of the precipice. Behind its little gallery, there is a mighty holly, under which the snow rarely lays in winter, or the rain drops in summer. Beneath the shelter of this tree, and within the bank at its foot, I dug a little cell large enough to hold two beds, a bench, a hearth, a table, and a 'kistie.' The sides were lined with deals well caulked with moss, and the roof was constructed in the same manner, but covered with a tarpauling, which, lying in the slope of the surrounding bank, carried off any water which might descend from thaw or rain, and, when the autumn trees shook off their leaves, could not be distinguished from the adjoining bank. Its door was on the brink of the craig, veiled by the thick bird-cherries on the edge of the precipice; and the entrance to the little path, which ascended from either side upon the brow of the rock, was concealed by a screen of birch and hazel, beneath which the banks were covered with primroses, wood-anemones, and forget-me-not. Bowers of honeysuckle and wild-roses twined among the lower trees; and even in the tall pines above, the rose sometimes climbed to the very top, where all its blossoms, clustering to the sun, hung in white tassels out of the dark-blue foliage. There the thrush and the blackbird sang at morning and evening, and the owl cried at night, and the buck belled upon the Torr.—Blessed, wild, free, joyous dwelling, which we shall never see again!"

A lovely place indeed must that have been in the pleasant days of summer! We do not wonder at the fondness with which the Stuarts speak of that lodge in the wilderness, reared as it was in the midst of the most beautiful and romantic scenery which exists within the compass of the seas of Britain, or, for aught we know, elsewhere. Years have rolled by since we last set foot upon the banks of Findhorn; but never shall we forget the glories of that deep ravine, or the noble woods of Altyre, still possessed by the descendants of the princely Comyns. Did we not expect to be summoned out within half an hour to contribute to the safety of the realm by breaking the head of a Chartist, we should ourselves launch out into description, and try conclusions with Horatio M'Culloch. But, after all, it would be a work of supererogation. Mr St John has already illustrated most charmingly that abode of the faithful; and he will not be displeased to see that, even in painting, he has met with formidable rivals. Rarely, indeed, have we met with any thing so perfect as the following sketch:—

"Near Slui on the Findhorn there is a range of precipices and wooded steeps crowned with pine, and washed by a clear and rippling stream of the river, through which there is an excellent ford, very well known to the roe, for escaping to the woods of Slui when pressed by the hounds. This reach is called the Ledanreich, from a remarkable craig, a sheer naked even wall of sandstone, lying in horizontal strata eighty or ninety feet high: At the eastern extremity of this rock there is a great division, partly separated from the main curtain by a deep woody slope, which dips into the precipice with little more inclination from the perpendicular than to admit of careful footing. In the face of the divided craig, the decomposition of the softer stone between the courses of the strata has wasted it away into narrow galleries, which, passing behind the tall pillars of the pines growing from the rifts and ledges, extend along the face of the precipice, veiled by a deep tapestry of ivy, which spreads over the mighty wall of rock, and hangs from shelf to shelf over the covered ways. Beyond the craigs, the bank of the forest, an abrupt steep, covered with oak and copsewood, slopes down to the river, its brow darkened with a deep-blue cloud of pines, and its descent carpeted with moss, primroses, and pyrolas, here and there hollowed into quaint 'cuachs,' filled with hazels, thorns, and giant pines. Along this woody scarp, and through its thick copse, the roe had made narrow galleries, which communicated with the ivy corridors on the face of the craig, to which there were corresponding ways upon the opposite side. In that fortress of the rock, for shelter from the sun and flies, and seclusion from the stir of the world during the day in the heat of summer, the red-deer and roe made their secret haunt, concealed behind the deep dim veil of leaves, unseen and unsuspected in the cool hollows of the cliff. The prying eye might search the craig from below, and the beaters or the woodmen might whistle, and whoop, and shout above, but nothing appeared or moved except the gray falcon, which rose channering out of the rifts. Above the craig the wooded bank was so abrupt, that to the front view there was no indication of a slope, and any who passed quickly over the brow was immediately out of sight. At each descent beyond the extremities of the whole range of rocks there was a common roe's run and pass, which was supposed to be 'deadly sure' if the deer took the path, since the precipice below was believed to be an infallible barrier against any intermediate escape. Often, however, when pressed upon the terrace above, the deer neither went through the passes nor turned against the beaters, but vanished as if by magic—nobody could tell where; and it was the common opinion of the drivers and fishermen, that, when forced near the river, they threw themselves over the craigs 'for spite,'—a belief often confirmed by old Davie Simpson, who declared that he had often found their bodies beneath the rocks, and in the Cluach, the Clerk's Pool, and the 'Furling Hole.' He did not, however, relate what wounds they had, and the truth was, that those which disappeared at the brow of the Ledanreich dashed down the sudden dip of the bank between the precipices, and, turning through the ivy corridors, went out through the copse galleries upon the other side, and either descended to the water or skirted below the pass, and went back into the forest. Those which were found dead were such as had been mortally wounded at some in-wood pass, and, unable to take, or cross the water, had died on the beach, or been carried down by the river. In the same mysterious passages which gave concealment and escape to the stags and bucks, the does were used to lay with their kids, and from thence at morning and evening they brought them out to pluck the tender grass upon the green banks beyond. Often from the brow above, or from behind the ivy screen, we have watched their 'red garment' stealing through the boughs, followed by their little pair drawing their slender legs daintily through the wet dew, and turning their large velvet ears to catch every passing sound upon the breeze as it brought the hum of the water, or the crow of the distant cock—now trotting before, now lingering behind their dam, now nestling together, now starting off as the gale suddenly rustled the leaves behind them—then listening and re-uniting in a timorous plump, pricking their ears, and bobbing their little black noses in the wind,—then, as the doe dropped on her knees in the moss, and laid her side on the warm spot where the morning sun glanced in through the branches, they gambolled about her, leaping over her back, and running round in little circles, uttering that soft, wild, plaintive cry like the treble note of an accordion, till, weary of their sport, they lay down at her side, and slept while she watched as only a mother can. No marvel it was that they loved that safe and fair retreat, with all its songs and flowers, its plenty and repose. All around was sweet, and beautiful, and abundant, such as the poetical imagination of the painter can rarely compose, and never, unless like Salvator he has lived in the wilderness with its free denizens. Upon the summit above the craig there was a broad and verdant terrace surrounded by ivied pines and feathering birches, and upon a little green glade in the midst grow two of the most beautiful objects ever produced by art or nature. These were a pair of twin thorns exactly similar in size, age, and form, and standing about three yards from each other: their stems as straight as shafts, and their round and even heads like vast bushes of wild thyme, but each so overgrown with ivy and woodbine, that their slender trunks appeared like fretted columns, over which the thorny foliage served as a trellis to suspend the heavy plumes of the ivy and the golden tassels of the woodbine. Many a 'ladye's bower' we have seen, and many a rich and costly plant reared by the care of man, but none so beautiful as those lonely sisters of the forest, planted by His hand in His great garden, where none beheld but those for whom He made it lovely—the ravens of the rock, the deer who couched under its shade by night, and the birds who sang their matins and their even-song out of its sweet boughs."

If we go on quoting at this rate, we shall never reach the hill, and as yet we have not started from the hut. To say the truth, we are in no hurry, and neither, we suspect, upon many occasions were the Stuarts, indomitable huntsmen as they are. What though at night the river swept with the sound of thunder below, making the solid rock vibrate to its deep foundation,—what though the wind swept mightily down the ravine, swaying the trees like saplings, and threatening to tear them away,—what though the windows of heaven were open, and the deluge came down, and the bark of the hill-fox sounded sharp above the roaring of the water and the wood,—yet within that little bothy that rests upon the face of the craig, the wearied huntsmen slept peacefully; and in the morning, says one of them,—"I was awakened as usual by the whistle of the robin in the bird-cherry, and the sharp note of the blue bonnet sharpening his little saw on the top of the holly. I went out to the narrow terre-plain over the craig. The wind was gone, and the sun smiling on the still leaves and dewy grass—the flood torrent of the river dancing and laughing in its light, and the calm bright air breathing with the sweet perfume of the damp plants, and all the freshness and fragrance of the forest wilderness." We back it against the forest of Ardennes!

Every true hunter is humane. What! you say—do you call it humane to persecute the unfortunate stag, the monarch of the wilds, to the death?—to drive rifle-bullets into the target of the harmless roe? to murder otters by the dozen, and to slaughter seals by the score? Indubitably we do. Let us reason a little upon this. Yesterday, you recollect that you dined upon very juvenile veal, smothered in a mess of dingy vegetable matter which we apprehend to have been sorrel, after the beastly fashion of the Gauls. Posterior to that, you devoured the larger moiety of a duckling. This morning we saw you, with our own eyes, regaling yourself at the club, between the intervals of muffin, with what assuredly were cutlets of lamb. After all this, can you have the face to stand up and defend your own humanity? For how many days had the sun dawned upon that luckless calf, the mangled fragments of which upon your platter rather resembled the rags of a kid-glove, than food meet for the stomach of a Christian? How long had the feeble quackle of Draco been heard round the row of peas near which he unsuspiciously perambulated, little dreaming how much the pods thereof were mixed up with his future destiny? How many races were run upon the meadow by that perished daughter of the sheep? Three infantine lives cut off simply for your sole gormandising! This is but a slight case. Set you down to a rook-pie, and you will engulf a dozen unfortunates before you bury your visage in the pewter. Pay for you at Blackwall, and the whitebait will disappear by the thousand. It is in vain that you attempt to shift the atrocity of your inordinate appetite from your own shoulders to those of the grazier, the butcher, the poulterer, or the fisherman. Cobden, or Joe Hume, or any other of the political economists belonging to the tribe who would starve the workman in order that they may guzzle themselves, will tell you that invariably the demand regulates the supply. You, therefore, are the responsible party: the young have fallen into your Scylla—the immature of days have been swept into the vortex of your Charybdis! Moreover, if you were a sportsman—which you are not—our minds would be grievously troubled for the future safety of the singing-birds. Welford, the friend of Bright, as we all remember, proposed a grand crusade throughout Britain against the feathered tribe; and you are not at all unlikely to join in a general St Bartholomew of the sparrows. Do you venture to retort upon us? Do you think we take life unnecessarily, or that we are base enough to use our weapons until the quarry has reached its prime? No calf or fawn ever fell by the hand of the genuine hunter—no cheeper or pout ever sullied the interior of the sportsman's bag. Not until the better part of his life has been run,—till his muscles are hard as iron, his slot deep, and his branches towering on the beam,—not until he has lived and loved, do we strike down, as if with lightning and painless death, the great hart in the middle of the wilderness. But to all innocent things—to the harmless indwellers of the forest and moor, the true hunter is a guardian and a friend. The strong man is ever brave, and none but the strong can pass to where the herds of the mountain dwell.

One more scene at the Hut, and we shall illustrate this subject further.

"But though our bothie was far from resembling the Peri Paribanon's cell, or the rock-palace where the old kaiser keeps his court in the bowels of the Unterberg—we loved it, not only for its bucks and stags, and all its greenwood cheer, but for the love of nature by which it was surrounded. Beyond its 'vert and venison,' there was a world of life and interest for those who had the eye to mark and the heart to read its book. On every side we had companions; from the passenger which came from Norway, to the little native guest—the robin which roosted in the holly-bush above us. 'The robin?'—you smile and say. Yes, there was but one. He lived in the bush, as we lived in the bothie, and we were his neighbours too long not to be very well acquainted. His species, as well as all the small tribes, conformable to the minuteness of their range and habits, are very local, and may be found all the year in, or near, the same place; and those who feed them will rarely wait many minutes for their appearance. There were many robins which lived about the bothie, and all were continually in its vicinity, and very tame; but none so gentle and grateful as our little neighbour in the holly. They would, however, enter the hut, sit on the bed or the table, and hop about the floor, and, when I went out, follow me to the brae. They liked very much to see me turn up the soil, which always provided them with a little feast; accordingly, they were never absent at the planting of a shrub or a flower; and when I brought home, in my shooting-bag, a tuft of primroses, pyrolas, or lilies of the valley, they were always in attendance to see them put into the bank. For watching my occupation, they preferred something more elevated than the ground, but not so high as the branches of the trees, which were too far from the earth to give them a clear sight of what I turned up; for their accommodation, therefore, I made little crosses and crotchets, and, when I was planting, set them up beside me, moving them as I proceeded from place to place. Each was immediately occupied by an attentive observer; and, whenever an insect or a worm was discovered, one of the nearest darted down and caught it, even from between my fingers, and disappeared for a few moments under the rock or behind the great holly, to enjoy his success undisturbed. At his disappearance his place was immediately occupied by another, but at the return of the first it was amiably resigned by his successor. The blue-bonnets were almost as numerous as the robins, but they never arrived at the same intimacy and confidence. They never entered the bothie in my presence, and even when I fed them they would not approach as long as I remained outside the door; but as soon as I went in they descended four or five together, chattering and fluttering about the entrance, peeping in at the little window, and stretching their necks as far as they could, to see where I was, and if all was right. Then they would begin their breakfast on what I had left for them, talking a great deal about it, but occasionally ogling the door, in a manner from which I concluded that there was but small esteem or gratitude in their conversation.——Far different was the friendship of our little neighbour in the holly. In the morning he used to come down and perch on the arm of the bird-cherry, which stretched over the precipice before the door, waiting for its opening and the preparation of the breakfast, which he always shared; and when we were seated he would venture over the sill, and gather the crumbs about the table at our feet. Often when the first blood-red streaks of the autumn morning shone like lurid fire through the little window, we were awakened by his sad and solitary whistle, as he sat on his usual branch, his jet-black eye cast towards the door, impatient for our appearance. Many of his little cousins there were in the wood, with whom we were also well acquainted, and between us happened many an incident, which increased our interest and familiarity.

"I remember a day, one of those deep still blue days so solemn in the forest; the ground was covered with a foot of snow, and all the trees were hanging like gigantic ostrich feathers; but all the world was blue,—the sky was a sleeping mass of those heavy indigo clouds which forebode a 'feeding storm,'—not a tempest, but a fall of snow; for, in Scotland, snow is called 'storm,' however light and still it falls: thus, in tracking the deer, we say he 'has brushed the storm from the heather;' and a 'feeding storm' is when the clouds are continually feeding the earth with its velvet pall.—The reflection of those deep-blue clouds cast a delicate tint of the same colour over the whitened world. I was standing with my back against a huge pine—one of the old remnant of the great forest of Moray, which had, no doubt, heard the bell toll for the first Stuart earl.—I counted the rings in a smaller tree which once stood in the same hollow;—I shunned its wreck as I would have avoided a corpse which I could not bury, and always, when I passed near it, averted my face; but one day running to cut off a buck, and just heading him, I dropped on my knee to receive him as he came out from a mass of junipers, and when reloading, I found that I had knelt by the stump of my old friend.—I counted two hundred and sixty-four rings in his wood!—how many earls had he seen?—Well, I was leaning against his elder brother, as I suppose by the size. I had been there for a long time, waiting to hear the dogs bring back a buck from—I don't know now from where.——As I had been through all the swamps, and stripes, and wet hollows on that side of the forest, and waded through two and three feet of snow-wreaths, my kilt and hose, and, as it seemed, my flesh was saturated to the bones with 'snaw-bree,' and I began to beat, first one foot, and then the other, to quicken the blood, which was warm enough in my trunk.—I had scarce commenced this exercise, when I heard a little 'tic!' close to my ear, and the soft low voice of a bird—a sound, neither a whistle nor a chirp, but which I knew very well before I turned and saw the robin, who sat on a dry branch within a yard of my cheek. I guessed what had brought him: he was very cold, his ruffled back humped as round as a ball, and his tail drooping almost perpendicular with his legs, as if it was a little brown peg to lean on, like that on which the travelling Tyrolean merchant rests his pack. He looked at me with his large black eye, then, with a flirt of his tail and a bow with his head, indicated that, if I had no objection, he should like to descend to the place which I occupied; the object of which he expressed, by turning his head sidelong, and directing one eye into the black earth which my foot had beaten bare in the snow. I immediately drew back a couple of feet, and he instantly dropped into the spot of mould, peeped and picked under every leaf and clod of earth, and, when there was nothing more, hopped up on the guard of my rifle, on which I was leaning, and, turning his head, looked at me with his upper eye.—I again stepped forward, and recommenced my foot-exercise, during which he returned to his branch, examining my progress with some impatience. As soon as my foot was removed, he again dropped into the hollow, and busily collected all the little grubs and chrysales which, though too small for me to see as I stood, I knew abounded beneath the sere leaves and thatch of moss and sticks. In this manner I repeated his supply several times, on one of which, when I was too long, or he too impatient, he dropped from his perch, and hovered over the space in which my foot was at work, and, as I continued, lighted on the point of the other shoe, and remained there, peeping into the hollow, until I withdrew my foot, and then descended to finish his repast. When he was satisfied, he ruffed his feathers, looked up sidelong to me, and, after a shake of satisfaction, resumed his perch close to my head, and, after pruning and oiling his feathers, mounted another branch higher, and opened his little throat with that most sad, sweet, and intermitting warble which gives such a melancholy charm to a still winter's day."

Take a picture of the roe, and you will hardly doubt the humanity of our sportsmen. But why talk of it thus? No one, we hope, save a member of the Manchester manufacturing school could feel otherwise—certainly not a genuine hills-man; and we quote the passage simply for its extreme beauty and perfect fidelity to nature. No creature is more beautiful than the kid of the roe-deer, especially when seen in their rest, or moving through the ferns, on a summer evening, beside their gentle mother the doe.

"In the bedding season the does retire into the most secret thickets, or other lonely places, to produce their young, and cover them so carefully that they are very rarely found; we have, however, deceived their vigilance. There was a solitary doe which lived in the hollow below the BrÀigh-cloiche-lÉithe in Tarnaway. I suppose that we had killed her 'marrow;' but I was careful not to disturb her haunt, for she was very fat and round, stepped with much caution, and never went far to feed. Accordingly, when at evening and morning she came out to pick the sweet herbs at the foot of the brae, or by the little green well in its face, I trode softly out of her sight, and if I passed at noon, made a circuit from the black willows, or thick junipers, where she reposed during the heat. At last, one fine sunny morning I saw her come tripping out from her bower of young birches as light as a fairy, and very gay and 'canty'—but so thin, nobody but an old acquaintance could have known her. For various mornings afterwards I saw her on the bank, but she was always restless and anxious—listening and searching the wind—trotting up and down—picking a leaf here and a leaf there, and after her short and unsettled meal, she would take a frisk round leap into the air—dart down into her secret bower, and appear no more until the twilight. In a few days, however, her excursions became a little more extended, generally to the terrace above the bank, but never out of sight of the thicket below. At length she ventured to a greater distance, and one day I stole down the brae among the birches. In the middle of the thicket there was a group of young trees growing out of a carpet of deep moss, which yielded like a down pillow. The prints of the doe's slender-forked feet were thickly tracked about the hollow, and in the centre there was a bed of the velvet 'fog,' which seemed a little higher than the rest, but so natural, that it would not have been noticed by any unaccustomed eye. I carefully lifted the green cushion, and under its veil, rolled close together, the head of each resting on the flank of the other, nestled two beautiful little kids, their large velvet ears laid smooth on their dappled necks, their spotted sides sleek and shining as satin, and their little delicate legs as slender as hazel wands, shod with tiny glossy shoes as smooth and black as ebony, while their large dark eyes looked at me out of the corners with a full, mild, quiet gaze, which had not yet learned to fear the hand of man: still they had a nameless doubt which followed every motion of mine—their little limbs shrunk from my touch, and their velvet fur rose and fell quickly; but as I was about to replace the moss, one turned its head, lifted its sleek ears towards me, and licked my hand as I laid their soft mantle over them. I often saw them afterwards when they grew strong, and came abroad upon the brae, and frequently I called off old Dreadnought when he crossed their warm track. Upon these occasions he would stand and look at me with wonder—turn his head from side to side—snuff the ground again, to see if it was possible that he could be mistaken—and when he found that there was no disputing the scent, cock one ear at me with a keener inquiry, and seeing that I was in earnest, trot heavily onward with a sigh.

"The affection of the roe for their young is very strong; and timid and feeble as they are by nature, inspired by the danger of their offspring, they become brave and daring, and, in their defence, will attack not only animals but men. We were one day passing along the west walk of Eilean-Agais, and, beyond a turn in the path, heard the sound of feet running towards us, and immediately out shot a cat round the corner, and, close at her heels, a doe pursuing her with great eagerness. Knowing that her pursuer could not overtake her, and having no instinctive dread of her kind, the cat did not give herself the trouble to run faster than just sufficient to keep beyond her reach, while the doe pursued her with an angry scrambling pace, and, whenever she was near overtaking her, endeavoured to kneel on her back. This is a mode of attack common to deer as well as cattle, which, when they have overthrown their object, not only gore them with their horns, but bruise and crush them with their knees. At our appearance there was a pause; the cat cantered up the brae to the top of a little rock, where she lay down in the sun to see what would happen between us and her pursuer. The doe, after a few bounds, turned round and looked indignantly at us, and stamped and belled in great displeasure; this she continued for some moments, glancing occasionally at the cat with a strong desire to resume her chase; but being restrained by a sense of prudence, she slowly ascended the hill, stopping at intervals to stamp and bell at us, who knew very well that she had two kids in the junipers upon the craig."

Now let us up to the hill, where the mighty herds are feeding. Scotland will, in all probability, never see a tainchel more; indeed, save at a royal hunting, it were scarcely desirable now. The feudal system has melted away, the clans are broken and scattered, and we care not again to see a pageant which is indissolubly connected in our memories with national gallantry and misfortune. But the deer are still on the mountain and in the wood, and we shall seek them in their former haunt. Wood-stalking, though the Stuarts speak of it with considerable enthusiasm, was never much to our taste. It is true that the largest stags are generally to be met with in the wood, and we have followed the sport ere now in the Spessart, among the pines of Darmstadt, and the thickets of Strath Garve; but it must always partake more or less of the character of driving, and we never have felt, while engaged in it, that enthusiasm and keenness which sends the blood to the heart of the hunter when he first discovers a herd in the gorge of some solitary glen. Then he feels that he must put forth the whole resources of his art—that he must baffle the acutest of all instincts by the aid of human cunning—that he has a thousand difficulties to overcome before he can arrive within reach of his quarry, and that a single false step or miscalculation is sufficient to destroy the labour, the patience, and the vigilance of a day.

Great, fat fallow-deer, waxing into obesity in a park, do not seem to mind the approach of a human being, even were he an alderman redolent of black-currant jelly. But the red-deer, as many incipient stalkers know to their cost, has a very different amount of perception. Unless you take the wind of him, he is off like a shot, though your distance may be upwards of a mile. In the words of the old stalker, "Above all things, let not the devil tempt you to trifle with a deer's nose: you may cross his sight, walk up to him in a gray coat, or, if standing against a tree or rock near your own colour, wait till he walks up to you; but you cannot cross his nose, even at an incredible distance, but he will feel the tainted air. Colours or forms may be deceptive or alike; there are gray, brown, and green rocks and stocks as well as men, and all these may be equivocal; but there is but one scent of man, and that he never doubts or mistakes; that is filled with danger and terror, and one whiff of its poison at a mile off, and, whether feeding or lying, his head is instantly up, his nose to the wind, and, in the next moment, his broad antlers turn, and he is away to the hill or the wood; and if there are no green peas, corn, or potatoes in the neighbourhood, he may not be seen on the same side of the forest for a month." A word to the wise, from the lips of a Celtic Solon!

So much for your chance, if, in the plenitude of your full flavour, you take the hill, regardless of the currents of the air, which, moreover, are perpetually shifting. But there are other difficulties. Though not impossible, it is very ticklish work to get within shot of a deer by any other means save diligent creeping, and sometimes, when the ground is unusually flat and open, that method of approach is impracticable. Then there are divers enemies—that is, of yours, for in reality they are scouts to the deer—whom you must try particularly to avoid. This is not easy. Sometimes when you are sinuating like a serpent towards the especial stag of your heart, a blundering covey of grouse will start from the heather, and give an effectual alarm; sometimes the shrill whistle of the plover will change your anticipated triumph into mourning; and sometimes a charge of that disagreeable cavalry the mountain sheep, little less sagacious and wary than the deer themselves, will put the whole of the glen into disorder. But the worst enemies you have to guard against are the hinds, who are usually so disposed as to be out upon the feeding-grounds, and thus to mask the stag. In such a position, it becomes a point of honour to circumvent the lady, which is any thing but an easy task. The Stuarts give us an admirable recollection of such a scene in the forest of Glen-Fidich, which is so exciting that, though rather long, we make no apology for transferring it to the columns of Maga.

"After about an hour's stalking, we came upon the shoulder of a long slope, which looks into the gorges of two or three short glens, opening to a narrow plain, on which we saw a noble sight—a herd of four or five hundred deer, among which were many very fine stags. After having feasted my eyes with this splendid sight—the illustrious cavalry of the hill, the crowned and regal array of the wilderness—I began to calculate how to make the approach, how to slip between the chain of vidette hinds, and numerous picquets of small stags, which commanded almost every knoll and hollow. In the centre of the main body, with a large plump of hinds—which he herded within a wide vacant circle—there was a mighty black hart, with a head like a blasted pine, and a cluster of points in each crown. Though each stag of the surrounding circle had not less than ten points, there were none which approached his size, and they all kept at a respectful distance, while he marched round and round the central group of hinds. 'He will have them all in the ring before long,' said MacLellan; 'yon's one of the old heroes of the Monadh-liath; he has not been four-and-twenty hours in the forest.' I looked with an eager and longing eye at his gigantic stature, but there was no apparent possibility of approaching even the outward circle of stags. The herd was scattered over all the ground between the hills, and every little knoll and eminence had its restless picquets, and plumps of discomfited stags, which had been beaten by the great hart, and were chafing about, driving off and broding the buttocks of all the inferior stags which came in their way, then returning and staring with jealous disgust at the mighty stranger, who gave them no notice, except when one or two more audacious, or less severely beaten, made a few steps before his companions; upon which he immediately charged, drove them before him, and scattered the nearest in every direction. Upon these occasions, some hind of greater levity than the rest took the opportunity of extending her pasture, or paying her compliments to her companions, for which she immediately received a good prod in the haunch, and was turned back again into the centre.

"'There is no doing any thing there,' said I.

"''Deed no', replied MacLellan, shutting up his glass, 'we be to go down to the foot of the burn.'

"This was a stream which runs through the middle of the narrow plain, and empties itself into the Fidich, about four miles below, at the east end of the forest. Before resolving upon this, however, we made an attempt to cross the little glen to the north-west; but, after passing round one hill, and nearly to the top of another, we fell in with a small herd of insignificant stags, but none among them being worth the disturbance of the great herd; and being unable to pass them unobserved, we were obliged to adopt the last alternative, and descend to the Fidich. In about an hour and a half we performed this retrogration, and, having crossed at the forester's house, ascended the burn till we again approached the deer, and stealing from knoll to knoll, again came in sight of the herd. The outskirts of its wide circle had been much broken and deranged by the jousts and expulsions during our absence; and we saw that it was impossible to get near the better stags without taking the channel of the stream. We immediately descended into the water, and crept up the middle, sometimes compelled to crouch so low, that the pools reached our hips, and, as the stones were round and slippery, it was very uneasy to proceed without floundering and splashing. At length, however, we were within the circle of the deer: there was not a breath of wind, and the least sound was audible in the profound stillness. We slipped through the water like eels, till we came to a little rock, which, crossing the burn, made a shelving fall, which there was no means of passing, but by drawing ourselves up the shoot of the stream. With some difficulty I pushed my rifle before me along the edge of the bank, and then, while the water ran down our breasts, we glided up through the gush of the stream, and reached the ledge above. The return of the water, which I had obstructed, made, however, a rush and plash different from its accustomed monotonous hum, and I had scarce time to lay flat in the burn, when a hind sprung up within a few yards, and trotted briskly away, then another, and another. I thought that all was over, and that, in the next moment, we should hear all the clattering hoofs going over the turf like a squadron of cavalry. All remained still, however, and, in a few seconds, I saw the first hind wheel about, and look back steadily towards the fall. I was rejoiced to observe that she had not seen us, and had only been disturbed by the unusual sound of the water. She continued, however, anxious and suspicious—watched and listened—picked off the tops of the heather—then walked on, with her ears laid back, and her neck and step stilting away as stiff as if she had been hung up in the larder for a week. This, however, was not the worst; all the surrounding hinds which noticed her gait gathered here and there, and stood on the tops of the little knolls, like statues, as straight as pucks, with nothing visible but their narrow necks and two peg-legs, and their broad ears perked immovably towards us, like long-eared bats. MacLellan gave me a rueful look. 'Cha n'eil comas air.' 'Never mind,' said I, 'we shall see who will be tired first.' The forester gave a glance of satisfaction, slid up his glass on the dry bank, and we lay as still as the stones around us, till the little trouts, which had been disturbed by our convulsion, became so accustomed to our shapes, that they again emerged from under the flat pebbles, and returned to their station in the middle of the stream, skulling their little tails between my legs with no more concern than if I had been a forked tree. At length the immobility of the hinds began to give way: first one ear turned back, then another, then they became sensible of the flies, and began to flirt and jerk as usual, and, finally, one applied her slender toe to her ear, and another rubbed her velvet nose upon her knee;—it was more than half an hour, however, before, one by one, they began to steal away, perking and snuffing, and turning to gaze at the least air that whiffed about them. At length they all disappeared, except one gray, lean, haggard old grandmother of hinds, who had no teeth, and limped with one leg, probably from a wound which she received fifty or perhaps a hundred years before I was born. Her vigilance, however, was only sharpened by age; time, and the experience of many generations, had made her acquainted with all the wiles and crafts of the hill,—her eyes and ears were as active as a kid's, and I have no doubt she could smell like Tobit's devil.—MacLellan looked at her through his glass, and spit into the burn, and grinned against the sun—as if he was lying in the bilboes instead of cold water.—The old sorceress continued to watch us without relaxation, and at last lay down on the brow of the knoll, and employed her rumination in obstinate contemplation of the bank under which we were ambushed. There was now no alternative but to recommence our progress up the burn; and as I was determined to circumvent the hind, I prepared for every inconvenience which could be inflicted by the opposite vexations of a sharp, rough, slippery, and gravelly stream. Fortunately, at the place where we then were, it was so narrow, that we could hold by the heather on both sides, and thus drag ourselves forward through the water, between each of which advances I pushed my rifle on before me. In this manner we reached the turn of the brook, where I concluded that we should be round the shoulder of the knoll, and out of sight of the hind, who lay upon its east brow. This was effected so successfully, that, when we looked behind, we only saw her back, and her head and ears still pointing at the spot which we had left. One hundred yards more would bring us within sight of the great hart; the general position of the herd had not changed, and I hoped to find him near the central knoll of the flat, at the base of which the burn circled. We were almost surrounded by deer; but the greater number were small vigilant hinds, the abomination and curse of a stalker. At length, however, we reached the knoll, and rested, to take breath, at its foot; I examined my rifle, to see that the lock was clean and dry. We took a view of all around us, and, drawing ourselves cautiously out of the burn, slid up through the heather on the south side of the eminence.—Scarce, however, had our legs cleared the stream, when we discovered a pair of ears not above fifteen yards from the other side.—'Mo mhallachd ort!' [My curse upon you]—whispered MacLellan. She had not discovered us, however, and we glided round the base of the knoll—but on the other side lay three hinds and a calf, and I could see no trace of the great hart.—On the edge of the burn, however, further up, there were five very good stags, and a herd of about thirty deer, on the slope of the north brae. All round us the ground was covered with hinds; for the prevalence of the westerly wind, during the last few days, had drawn the deer to that end of the forest. Upon the spot where I lay, though I could only see a portion of the field, I counted four hundred and seventy; and it was evident that no movement could be made upon that side. We tried again the opposite slope of the knoll;—the hind which we had first seen was still in the same place, but she had laid down her head, and showed only the gray line of her back over the heather. We drew ourselves cautiously up the slope and looked over the summit. On the other side there was a small flat moss, about seventy yards in breadth; then another hillock; and to the left two more, with little levels, and wet grassy hollows between them. Upon the side of the first knoll there were two young stags and some hinds; but the points of some good horns showed above the crest.—The intervening ground was spotted with straggling hinds, and we might lay where we were till to-morrow morning, without a chance of getting near any of the good deer. While we deliberated, MacLellan thought that, by crawling with extreme caution up a wet hollow to the left, we might have a chance to approach the stags whose horns we had seen behind the other knoll, and, as nothing better could be done, we decided upon this attempt. The sun was going down from the old towers of AuchandÙn, and we had no more time than would give light for this venture.—We slid away towards the hollow, and, drawing ourselves, inch by inch, though the heather and tall thin grass, had reached the middle of the level between the hillocks, when we heard a stamp and a short grunt close beside us—I had scarce time to turn my head, and catch a glimpse of a base little gray hind who, in crossing the hollow, had stumbled upon us.—It was but a moment: a rapid wheel and rush through the long grass, and I heard the career of a hundred feet going through the hollow. I sprung on my knee, and skaled a dozen small stags and hinds which came upon us full speed; for those behind, not knowing from whence came the alarm, made straight for the hill. The herd were now gathering in all directions; charging—flying—re-uniting, dispersing, and reassembling in utter disorder, like a rout of cavalry.—I made a run for the middle knoll,—two stags, with pretty good heads, met me right in the face.—I did not stop to look at them, but rushed up the brae.—What a sight was seen from its top!—upwards of six hundred deer were charging past—before, behind, around, in all directions.—The stately figure which I sought—the mighty black hart, was slowly ascending an eminence about three hundred yards off, from whence he reconnoitred the ground below; while the disarray of stags and hinds gathered round him, like rallying masses of hussars in the rear of a supporting column. I was so intent upon the king of the forest, that I saw nothing else.—No other heads, forms, numbers, took any place in my senses; all my faculties were on the summit of that height.—At this moment I felt my kilt drawn gently; I took no notice—but a more decided pull made me look round:—MacLellan motioned up the slope, and I saw the points of a good head passing behind a little ridge, about eighty yards away. I looked back at the hart—he was just moving to the hill. What would I have given to have diminished a hundred and fifty yards of the distance which divided us! He passed slowly down the back of the eminence and disappeared, and the gathering herd streamed after him. 'O ChÌal! A ChÌal!' exclaimed the forester—'bithidh È air fÀlbh!' The stag whose horns I had seen had come out from behind the ridge, and stood with his broad side towards me, gazing at the herd; but as they moved away, he now began to follow. The disappearance of the great hart, and the disappointment of MacLellan, recalled me to the last chance. I followed the retreating stag with my rifle, passed it before his shoulder, whiz went the two-ounce ball, and he rolled over headlong in the heath, on the other side of the knoll, which the next stretch would have placed between us. I looked to the hill above: the whole herd was streaming up the long green hollow in its west shoulder headed 'by the mighty of the desert.' They rounded and passed the brow, and sloped upward on the other side, till the forest of heads appeared bristling along the sky-line of the summit. In a few moments afterwards, as the sun was going down upon ScÙr-na-Lapaich, and the far western hills of Loch Duaich, the terrible wide-forked tree came out in the clear eastern sky on the top of the hill, and, crowding after, at least two hundred heads—crossing, and charging, and mingling—their polished points flashing in the parting sunbeams, and from many a horn, the long steamers of the moss fluttering and flying like the pennons and bannerolles of lances. The herd continued to file along the ridge of the hill, and wheeling below the crest, countermarched along the sky-line, till their heads and horns slowly decreased against the light."

With such a book as this before us, we could go on alternately commenting and extracting until we had broken the back of the Number. Even now we are dying to pilfer the account of the late Glengarry's course with "Black Dulochan," and the no less exciting history of the three day's ruse with a roebuck. But abstinence is a virtue which is forced upon us in the present instance, rather from the lack of space than from any exercise of voluntary discretion; and we shall now leave the deer without further molestation for a season, hoping soon to encounter them in person with our rifle somewhere about the skirts of Cairn-Gorm.

This is, we have no hesitation in saying, the best work on deer-stalking which has yet been written; and the amount of information which it contains regarding the habits of the stag and roe, combined with the vivid pictures of which we have made such ample use, cannot fail to render it popular. In an antiquarian point of view, it is also highly interesting; for it embodies a large amount of traditionary lore, sketches of the clans, and fragments of Highland song, of much superior merit to those which have hitherto come into our hands. The disquisitions, too, upon the disappearance of some animals once indigenous to Scotland—such as the wolf, the elk, the wild bull, and the beaver—exhibit a great amount of research, and supply a gap which has long been wanted in the page of natural history.

One word to the authors—though we fear our words must travel a long way before they can reach them in a foreign land. Why should they not recast and add to their second volume, so as to make it a single and unrivalled work upon the noblest sports of the Highlands? If it has proved so fascinating, as in truth we have felt it, in the more cumbrous shape of notes, how much better would it be if issued, not as an appendage to the poems, but in a distinct and articulate form? Perpend upon this, John Sobieski and Charles Edward, at your leisure; and let us add, that we trust some of your more gloomy anticipations may fall short of reality; that the walks of Eilean-Agais, that little Eden of the north, may again be gladdened by your presence; and that the sound of your hunting-horns may once more be heard in the woods of Tarnaway, and on the hills near the sources of the Findhorn.