keepers who have charge of that portion of his grounds, you would be perpetually landing yourself in culs-de-sac, and being lured on into ugly scrambles where retreat is difficult and advance impossible. The forest is "grand ground," as any connoisseur will tell you. Although by no means large, it is amply stocked, for there are famous preserves on three sides of it; and in the depths of its valleys there is splendid feeding that seduces the deer from extraordinary distances. But the stalking is as difficult as well may be. In the first place, you may sweep your range of vision with the telescope, overlooking, after all, a number of animals hidden out of sight, who will be sure to spoil your stalk on the victim you have set your affections on. Then unless you have the head and foot of a chamoishunter, you are not at all unlikely to come to grief: while the actual exercise, toiling up rocky heights, only to come down again; hanging on to ledges of rock by the eyelids; dragging yourself along stony watercourses at a frightful expenditure of skin and homespun, is sufficient to test the stamina of the strongest. Finally, it is difficult for the most experienced of stalkers to make due allowance for the caprices of the wind. It twists and turns in the most tantalising fashion in the folds of the hills and the recesses of the corries; and just as you are crawling up wind, as you fondly imagine, and congratulating your self on a most successful cast, you are disagreeably conscious of a side puff on your cheek that must infallibly carry the alarm to the quarry. But all the difficulties that would be insurmountable drawbacks to many people, are only additional attractions to the laird. Many is the night he has lain out under the "Shelter Stone" with a bundle of

heather for a pillow, his plaid for bed-clothes, and a sandwich and his whisky-flask for sole refreshments; although now, chiefly in deference to the sybaritism of his friends, he has set up a lodge in the wilderness, where they can be tolerably comfortable on occasion.

Though the laird in these latter days occasionally takes his family to town for a month or so in the season, his habits are very different from those of the gentlemen who make a dash at the moors or the forests for a few weeks in the autumn. He lives on his territory all the year round; sport in its different shapes is pretty much his only avocation; and he is most hospitable in filling his house with guests, who take his annual invitations almost as a matter of course. It is odd indeed if they cannot find plenty to do; and even if they should be kept close prisoners by the weather, there are a library and an excellent billiard-table and agreeable young women within doors. There is capital mixed shooting on the lower ground, or what may be called the lower ground by comparison. The birch-woods that come stretching down to Lochlyle are famous places for black-game and woodcocks; and when a flight of woodcocks arrives with the first frost, the laird sends expresses forthwith to his neighbours, who are looking out in keen expectation. These gentlemen gather in fast with their attendant gillies, and the party sets out in line after breakfast from the very door of the house. Now it is a hare that gets up, now a couple of roe who have been crouching in their lair with ears laid back and heads buried in the heather, hoping in vain that the bacarme would go by. Now they stumble among some partridges that rise only to scatter and drop again; and then in the corner of some thicker patch of cover,

itself heard more and more frequently in every variety of Gaelic gutturals; and then follows the shot or the succession of shots, as the crescent-winged bird goes zigzagging softly away among the scattered tree-stems in some clearing in the copsewood. Or there is a whir and a loud rustle through the trees, and the heavy blackcock is brought up in his rapid flight, to come down with a crash among the branches that interlace themselves over the brook below.

In winter, when there is little else to be had, there is duck and wild-fowl shooting; and that in spring and early summer is followed by the salmon-fishing. The laird prides himself on his skill with the rod rather more than on his prowess with the rifle; and he is as well off for water as he ought to be, considering the variety of it that there is on his domains. Trout swarm everywhere; and though the little yellow-bellied fellows in the brooks and rivulets seldom run more than four to the pound, they are wonderfully strong for their size. As a rule, however, except for an occasional dish for breakfast, very little attention is paid to these, although now and then the boys will condescend to ply the otter among the shoals of still smaller fry in one of the mountain tarns. But there is unrivalled sea-trout fishing at the head of the loch, where the tide runs into the river; and the lower pools of the Ernan are famed far and wide for salmon. Where the hills have closed in on the level strath, the Ernan winds along among the rocks

and the birch-woods, now tumbling over half-submerged shelves in an infinity of white tiny cataracts-now rushing along in a narrowed bed in a succession of black bubbling swirls -now eddying fretfully under the bank, beneath the overhanging roots and the heather. It is no easy matter to make a cast in some of these pools, where you have to balance yourself in fishing-boots on a slippery shelf, with the branches of the trees behind bending down over your shoulder; and you dare not cut them away, for fear of the salmon resenting it. But the laird handles his heavy rod in these circumstances as if he had been born and bred up to the calling of an acrobat he casts a long line out underhand, with the skill that has been born of much experience; and the sober-coloured fly is pitched, with miraculous dexterity, right into the very ripple it is meant for. But when the fish does come at it with a resolute rush, and the long line runs out with a rattle, the situation of the angler may be critical, not to say positively perilous. Fighting every yard of the water on a system of tactics that changes with the necessities of the case, it is a question when to humour the salmon, when to force him, and when to head him up the stream by dint of firm persuasion. Instinct suggests the most dangerous dodges to him, and he seems to be thoroughly aware how awkwardly his enemy is hampered. "Show him the butt of the rod may be an excellent maxim; but how are you to do it when you are doubled up among the trees, with the top of it rustling against the branches? He makes a dash straight for the sea, as if he had no idea of stopping till he got there; and if you are too brusque in your hints that he had better stay, it is a sovereign to a shilling that something gives way with you.

He is doing everything he knows to test the soundness of your tackle, if he is foiled in that determined rush. He is winding the line about among the stones, grazing it against their sharp edges, or else he is down with his nose in the gravel, grinding at the hook for dear life. Possibly he takes to sulking-a sore trial to the temper-when he absolutely declines to pay any attention to the stones you hail down in his direction. And it is worse still when he will insist upon your following him, although the track along the banks is wellnigh impracticable, even when the scrambler has both hands at his disposal. But the trials and anxieties increase the value of the triumph, when at last he begins to own himself beaten, and when you can see the scales of silver glancing to the light as you guide him gently within reach of the gaff. Not a pennyweight less than sixteen pounds, in prime condition, clean run from the sea, and covered still with the-sea lice he has brought with him. A fish like that deserves a dram; and the laird takes a hearty pull at his flask before passing it on to his gillie. Nor has he seen the last of him, as he is happy to think, when the salmon is sent promptly off to the kitchen; and the well-spread table of a wellconducted Highland mansion is far from being one of its least agree able features. The cook is something of a cordon bleu, and never at a loss for materials. What haunches and necks of hill-flavoured venison and to our mind, the red deer, with the sauce of a Highland appetite, is no whit inferior to the park-fed fallow deer. At all events, there is no saying a word in detraction of the saddles and cutlets of the mountain mutton. We have adverted already to the tureens of hare-soup, that should be duly flavoured with port or Madeira; and

then there are the grouse of the season, that have just been sufficiently hung, without sacrificing the piquancy of the bitter of the backs-grouse en salmi, and in pies, and split and "brandered;" the woodcocks fat as butter, with their melting trails; the black-game, that make an agreeable variety; the snipe and the ducks; the salmon, served in the sublime simplicity of the water he was boiled in, and in cutlets, and in curry, and in kipper; the pinkcoloured sea-trout and the white little burn-trout, by no means bad in their way as a pis aller for breakfast; herrings from the loch, as delicate as those of Loch Fyne; and fresh haddocks from the neighbouring ocean that might hold their own with those of Dublin Bay. Considering that the laird has an excellent cellar, and that the family has always prided itself on its claret in especial, since his grandfather and forebears were in the habit of smuggling it, it must be owned that a man might find worse quarters, although Lochlyle may be scarcely a paradise, so far as its climate is concerned.

Perhaps the Highlands have most fascination for a man with a dash of the adventurer in him, who is hard and sound in mind and body; who loves to brace his sinews in exposure and with severe exercise; who does not object to an occasional touch of hardship; who can make himself happy among well-chosen books as the companions of his leisure hours, when he is not living in a house that is filled with congenial company. But there is much to be said, on the other hand, for the life of the English squire. It is true that, so far from being monarch of all he surveys, and a good deal more, he is rather "crowded up," as the Yankees would say. The lands of his neighbours cut here and there into his

own; and when he flushes birds upon farms not very far from his house, they are apt to drop beyond his boundaries. But then he has plenty of pleasant society in a neighbourhood that is full of quiet domestic beauties, if it has not the grandeur of the shores of Lochlyle. The hall may stand a trifle low. Those who built the oldest part of it, in the days of the Tudors, had a habit of coming down like rats to the water. But the suspicion of damp that hangs about the little river and the lake fosters timber and shrubberies into the richer luxuriance, and gives a brilliant freshness to the grass and the foliage. The house is a long and rather rambling building, where you have never far to mount to your room, though you may have a long way to walk along the corridors and up the quaint oak staircases; and the mullioned windows, with their lozenged lattices, are embowered in their masses of roses and creepers. The doors open on a broad terrace looking over the velvet lawns and variegated flower-beds to the undulations of the beautifully-timbered park, that seems to shade away imperceptibly into the woodlands beyond. Scattered clumps of venerable trees throw out their gnarled boughs over great beds of bracken and bramble, where the fallow deer stand buried to their heads and horns; while there are groups of cattle that are scarcely less ornamental. Everything bears evidence of careful overlooking and liberal expenditure. The oaken fences of the park are kept up to perfection; and there is hardly a weed or a rut on the broad gravel drives, which provide easy and well-paid employment for half the old people in the village. The village itself is a show one. A low-aisled Norman church, with ivy-grown tower and mosscovered lich-gate, and superannu

ated yews all rent and torn by time, standing about among the simple tombstones; a vicarage half hidden out of sight among great shrubberies of laurel; quaint-gabled cottages in blooming gardens-cottages that are either as old as they seem or else admirable modern imitations; an old-fashioned inn, with a great bowwindow and a broad gravelled space before the door, where the sign is swinging from an overshadowing elm-tree; and better than all, a general look of contentment and cheerful comfort, which tells of confidence in kindly friends and happy relations with generous landlords.

The estate is a model of good English farming of the olden time, with just so many modern improvements introduced as may be compatible with preserving its picturesque appearance. Farmhouses with spacious kitchens, and with sumptuous parlours that are only used upon state occasions; rambling steadings round great straw-yards, where the cattle are ruminating up to their bellies in litter, and where pigs, constrained to cleanliness in spite of themselves, are grunting and gorging themselves in supreme felicity; a shady horse-pond well stocked with ducks and geese, flocks of fat poultry picking up a leisurely living among the wheatstacks, and flights of pigeons cooing on the tiles. There has been little grubbing of hedgerows or straightening of roads. The lanes meander about among thorn-bushes, matted with the wild clematis and overgrown with the wild hop and honeysuckle. There is turf enough between the hedges and the cart-way to pasture the horses of whole caravans of tramps and gipsies; and, in fact, you may often see them hobbled there, while the kettles are slung before the tents in some nook out of the wind or the sunshine. The

fields are cut up in all manner of waving lines and fantastic patterns, by copses and hangers and outlying spinneys, linked together by lines of trees growing out of the straggling hedges. It is scarcely what you would call a partridge country. There is more grass than wheat; and the root-crops on the higher lands, especially in a dry season, would seem mere spectres of profitable cultivation to a gentleman who farms in the Lothians. With so much that is primitive, even in the way of woods and furze and hedgerows, it is impossible to put your hand on the birds at the precise moment you are looking for them; and when you do find them, it is long odds that you fail to mark them in their longer flights. Yet they are there in plenty, as you may be very sure; for there are a wealth of breeding-places, and endless corners where they can bask, and delightfully dry elevations where they can take refuge from the rains in the spring. The fields are carefully bushed as you may see, and there is an ample strength of keepers, though the villagers, who have lived like their fathers on the estate, are but little addicted to poaching.

But the feature in such a southcountry shooting is the pheasants; and the land looks as if it had been laid out with a special eye to their delectation. Till they come to a sudden and violent death, the wild broods have pleasant times of it, with the dense undergrowth of bramble, where nothing but a fox or some prowler of the weasel species can make its way; with the gorse covers, where the foxes are carefully preserved, in the hope that they may stick pretty much to the rabbits; with the great patches of bracken in the park and along the lanes; with the long dry grassycovered ways, that run under the

roots of the hedge. And then, the numbers that are brought up under fowls. The head-keeper is handin-glove with the farmers, and their good-wives are always willing and eager to supply him with sittinghens. Spring after spring he shifts his breeding-ground, but it is always on some sunny, sheltered aspect in the immediate neighbourhood of his cottage and the kennels. There the long lines of coops are set out in the rank grass that is carefully strewn immediately in front of them; and he or one of his subordinates is always on duty to guard against the descent of hawks or jackdaws. How he has gone questing about in search of the early eggs before the voracious rooks and magpies have had time to anticipate him! What a pretty sight it is, when the young ones are hatched, and come running out of the grass to his call! And later, before the first of October, when their plumage is in its bloom, and they take a conscious pride in it, how ornamental they are in the stubbles and on the cover-side! How he can reconcile it to his feelings to see these pets of his shot down, is a question between himself and his conscience-on the same principle, we suppose, as the affectionate poultry-woman cherishes her ducklings to come in with the peas. But it is certain that there is a great charm in pheasant-shooting, however one may abuse the battues, which we have no great love for ourselves. There are few things pleasanter on a fresh autumn day, when the foliage has been thinned by rain, and the frosts have opened daylight through the broken-down undergrowth, and when the leaves that are still hanging on the trees are glowing in their gorgeous autumnal tints. Nor can anything be more lively than working quietly behind a couple or so of spaniels, when they are forcing the stray birds out of the