The disgorged eels are returned--some of them alive--to their native element--the mud. And the dead heron floats away before small winds and waves into the middle of the tarn. Where is he--the matchless Newfoundlander--_nomine gaudens_ FRO, because white as the froth of the sea? Off with a collie. So--stript with the first intention, we plunge from a rock, and,

"Though in the scowl of heaven, the tarn Grows dark as we are swimming,"

Draco-like, breast-high, we stem the surge, and with the heron floating before us, return to the heather-fringed shore, and give three cheers that startle the echoes, asleep from year's end to year's end, in the Grey-Linn Cairn.

Into the silent twilight of many a wild rock-and-river scene, beautiful and bewildering as the fairy work of sleep, will he find himself brought who knows where to seek the heron in all its solitary haunts. For often when the moors are storm-swept, and his bill would be baffled by the waves of tarn and loch, he sails away from his swinging-tree, and through some open glade dipping down to the secluded stream, alights within the calm chasm, and folds his wings in the breezeless air. The clouds are driving fast aloft in a carry from the sea--but they are all reflected in that pellucid pool--so perfect the cliff-guarded repose. A better day--a better hour--a better minute for fishing could not have been chosen by Mr Heron, who is already swallowing a par. Another--and another--but something falls from the rock into the water; and suspicious, though unalarmed, he leisurely addresses himself to a short flight up the channel--round that tower-like cliff standing strangely by itself, with a crest of self-sown flowering shrubs; and lo! another vista, if possible, just a degree more silent--more secluded--more solitary--beneath the mid-day night of woods! To shoot thee there--would be as impious as to have killed a sacred Ibis stalking in the shade of an Egyptian temple. Yet it is fortunate for thee--folded up there, as thou art, as motionless as thy sitting-stone--that at this moment we have no firearms--for we had heard of a fish-like trout in that very pool, and this--O Heron--is no gun but a rod. Thou believest thyself to be in utter solitude--no sportsman but thyself in the chasm--for the otter, thou knowest, loves not such very rocky rivers; and fish with bitten shoulder seldom lies here--that epicure's tasted prey. Yet within ten yards of thee lies couched thy enemy, who once had a design upon thee, even in the very egg. Our mental soliloquy disturbs not thy watchful sense--for the air stirs not when the soul thinks, or feels, or fancies about man, bird, or beast. We feel, O Heron! that there is not only humanity--but poetry, in our being. Imagination haunts and possesses us in our pastimes, colouring them even with serious, solemn, and sacred light--and thou assuredly hast something priest-like and ancient in thy look--and about thy light-blue plume robes, which the very elements admire and reverence--the waters wetting them not--nor the winds ruffling--and moreover we love thee--Heron--for the sake of that old castle, beside whose gloom thou utteredst thy first feeble cry! A Ruin nameless, traditionless--sole, undisputed property of Oblivion!

Hurra!--Heron--hurra! why, that was an awkward tumble--and very nearly had we hold of thee by the tail! Didst thou take us for a water-kelpie?

A fright like that is enough to leave thee an idiot all the rest of thy life. 'Tis a wonder thou didst not go into fits--but thy nerves must be sorely shaken--and what an account of this adventure will certainly be shrieked unto thy mate, to the music of the creaking boughs! Not, even wert thou a secular bird of ages, wouldst thou ever once again revisit this dreadful place. For fear has a wondrous memory in all dumb creatures--and rather wouldst thou see thy nest die of famine, than seek for fish in this man-monster-haunted pool. Farewell! farewell!

Many are the hundreds of hill and mountain lochs to us as familiarly known, round all their rushy or rocky margins, as that pond there in the garden of Buchanan Lodge. That pond has but one goose and one gander, and nine goslings--about half-a-dozen trouts, if indeed they have not sickened and died of Nostalgia, missing in the stillness the gurgle of their native Tweed--and a brace of perch, now nothing but prickle. But the lochs--the hill, the mountain lochs now in our mind's eye and our mind's ear,--heaven and earth! the bogs are black with duck, teal, and widgeon--up there "comes for food or play" to the holla of the winds, a wedge of wild geese, piercing the marbled heavens with clamour--and lo!

in the very centre of the mediterranean, the Royal Family of the Swans!

Up springs the silver sea-trout in the sunshine--see Sir Humphrey!--a salmon--a salmon fresh run in love and glory from the sea!

For how many admirable articles are there themes in the above short paragraph! Duck, teal, and widgeon, wild-geese, swans! And first, duck, teal, and widgeon. There they are, all collected together, without regard to party politics, in their very best attire, as thick as the citizens of Edinburgh, their wives, sweethearts, and children, on the Calton Hill, on the first day of the King's visit to Scotland. As thick, but not so steady--for what swimming about in circles--what ducking and diving is there!--all the while accompanied with a sort of low, thick, gurgling, not unsweet, nor unmusical quackery, the expression of the intense joy of feeding, freedom, and play. Oh! Muckle-mou'd Meg! neither thou nor the "Lang Gun" are of any avail here--for that old drake, who, together with his shadow, on which he seems to be sitting, is almost as big as a boat in the water, the outermost landward sentinel, near as he seems to be in the deception of the clear frosty air, is yet better than three hundred yards from the shore--and, at safe distance, cocks his eye at the fowler. There is no boat on the loch, and knowing that, how tempting in its unapproachable reeds and rushes, and hut-crested knoll--a hut built perhaps by some fowler, in the olden time--yon central Isle! But be still as a shadow--for lo! a batch of Whig-seceders, paddling all by themselves towards that creek--and as surely as our name is Christopher, in another quarter of an hour they will consist of killed, wounded, and missing. On our belly--with unhatted head just peering over the knowe--and Muckle mou'd Meg slowly and softly stretched out on the rest, so as not to rustle a windle-strae, we lie motionless as a maukin, till the coterie collects together for simultaneous dive down to the aquatic plants and insects of the fast-shallowing bay; and, just as they are upon the turn with their tails, a single report, loud as a volley, scatters the unsparing slugs about their doups, and the still clear water, in sudden disturbance, is afloat with scattered feathers, and stained with blood.

Now is the time for the snow-white, here and there ebon-spotted Fro--who with burning eyes has lain couched like a spaniel, his quick breath ever and anon trembling on a passionate whine, to bounce up, as if discharged by a catapulta, and first with immense and enormous high-and-far leaps, and then, fleet as any greyhound, with a breast-brushing brattle down the brae, to dash, all-fours, like a flying squirrel fearlessly from his tree, many yards into the bay with one splashing and momentarily disappearing spang, and then, head and shoulders and broad line of back and rudder tail, all elevated above or level with the wavy water-line, to mouth first that murdered mawsey of a mallard, lying as still as if she had been dead for years, with her round, fat, brown bosom towards heaven--then that old Drake, in a somewhat similar posture, but in more gorgeous apparel, his belly being of a pale grey, and his back delicately pencilled and crossed with numberless waved dusky lines--precious prize to one skilled like us in the angling art--next--nobly done, glorious Fro--that cream-colour-crowned widgeon, with bright rufus chestnut breast, separated from the neck by loveliest waved ash-brown and white lines, while our mind's eye feasteth on the indescribable and changeable green beauty-spot of his wings--and now, if we mistake not, a Golden Eye, best described by his name--finally, that exquisite little duck the Teal; yes, poetical in its delicately pencilled spots as an Indian shell, and when kept to an hour, roasted to a minute, gravied in its own wild richness, with some few other means and appliances to boot, carved finely--most finely--by razor-like knife, in a hand skilful to dissect and cunning to divide--tasted by a tongue and palate both healthily pure as the dewy petal of a morning rose--swallowed by a gullet felt gradually to be extending itself in its intense delight--and received into a stomach yawning with greed and gratitude,--Oh! surely the thrice-blessed of all web-footed birds; the apex of Apician luxury; and able, were anything on the face of this feeble earth able, to detain a soul, on the very brink of fate, a short quarter of an hour from an inferior Elysium!

How nobly, like a craken or sea-serpent, Fro reareth his massy head above the foam, his gathered prey seized--all four--by their limber necks, and brightening, like a bunch of flowers, as they glitter towards the shore! With one bold body-shake, felt to the point, of each particular hair, he scatters the water from his coat like mist, reminding one of that glorious line in Shakespeare,

"Like dewdrops from the Lion's mane,"

advancing with sinewy legs seemingly lengthened by the drenching flood, and dripping tail stretched out in all its broad longitude, with hair almost like white hanging plumes--magnificent as tail of the Desert-Born at the head of his seraglio in the Arabian Sands. Half-way his master meets his beloved Fro on the slope; and first proudly and haughtily pausing to mark our eye, and then humbly, as beseemeth one whom nature, in his boldest and brightest bearing, hath yet made a slave--he lays the offering at our feet, and having felt on his capacious forehead the approving pressure of our hand,

"While, like the murmur of a dream, He hears us breathe his name,"

he suddenly flings himself round with a wheel of transport, and in many a widening circle pursues his own uncontrollable ecstasies with whirlwind speed; till, as if utterly joy-exhausted, he brings his snow-white bulk into dignified repose on a knoll, that very moment illuminated by a burst of sunshine!

Not now--as fades upon our pen the solemn light of the dying day--shall we dare to decide, whether or not Nature--O most matchless creature of thy kind!--gave thee, or gave thee not, the gift of an immortal soul!--Better such creed--fond and foolish though it may be--yet scarcely unscriptural, for in each word of Scripture there are many meanings, even when each sacred syllable is darkest to be read,--better such creed than that of the atheist or sceptic, distracted ever in his seemingly sullen apathy, by the dim, dark doom of dust. Better that Fro should live, than that Newton should die--for ever. What though the benevolent Howard devoted his days to visit the dungeon's gloom, and by intercession with princes, to set the prisoners free from the low damp-dripping stone roof of the deep-dug cell beneath the foundation rocks of the citadel, to the high dewdropping vault of heaven, too, too dazzlingly illumined by the lamp of the insufferable sun! There reason triumphed--those were the works of glorified humanity. But thou--a creature of mere instinct--according to Descartes, a machine, an automaton--hadst yet a constant light of thought and of affection in thine eyes; nor wert thou without some glimmering and mysterious notions--and what more have we ourselves?--of life and of death! Why fear to say that thou wert divinely commissioned and inspired--on that most dismal and shrieking hour, when little Harry Seymour, that bright English boy, "whom all that looked on loved," entangled among the cruel chains of those fair water-lilies, all so innocently yet so murderously floating round him, was, by all standing or running about there with clenched hands, or kneeling on the sod--given up to inextricable death?

We were not present to save the dear boy, who had been delivered to our care as to that of an elder brother, by the noble lady who, in her deep widow's weeds, kissed her sole darling's sunny head, and disappeared. We were not present--or by all that is holiest in heaven or on earth--our arms had been soon around thy neck, when thou wert seemingly about to perish!

But a poor dumb despised dog--nothing, as some say, but animated dust--was there,--and without shout or signal--for all the Christian creatures were alike helpless in their despair--shot swift as a sunbeam over the deep, and by those golden tresses, sinking and brightening through the wave, brought the noble child ashore, and stood over him, as if in joy and sorrow, lying too like death on the sand! And when little Harry opened his glazed eyes, and looked bewildered on all the faces around--and then fainted--and revived and fainted again--till at last he came to dim recollection of this world on the bosom of the physician brought thither with incomprehensible speed from his dwelling afar off--thou didst lick his cold white hands and blue face, with a whine that struck awful pity into all hearts, and thou didst follow him--one of the group--as he was borne along--and frisking and gambolling no more all that day, gently didst thou lay thyself down at the feet of his little bed, and watch there unsleeping all night long! For the boy knew that God had employed one of his lowly creatures to save him--and beseeched that he might lie there to be looked at by the light of the taper, till he himself, as the pains went away, might fall asleep! And we, the watchers by his bedside, heard him in his dreams mentioning the creature's name in his prayers.

Yet at times--O Fro--thou wert a sad dog indeed--neither to bind nor to hold--for thy blood was soon set aboil, and thou--like Julius Caesar--and Demetrius Poliorcetes--and Alexander the Great--and many other ancient and modern kings and heroes--thou wert the slave of thy passions. No Scipio wert thou with a Spanish captive. Often--in spite of threatening eye and uplifted thong--uplifted only, for thou went'st unflogged to thy grave--didst thou disappear for days at a time--as if lost or dead.

Rumours of thee were brought to the kirk by shepherds from the remotest hills in the parish--most confused and contradictory--but, when collected and compared, all agreeing in this--that thou wert living, and lifelike, and life-imparting, and after a season from thy travels to return; and return thou still didst--wearied often and woe-begone--purpled thy snow-white curling--and thy broad breast torn, not disfigured, by honourable wounds. For never yet saw we a fighter like thee. Up on thy hind-legs in a moment, like a growling Polar monster, with thy fore-paws round thy foeman's neck, bull-dog, collie, mastiff, or greyhound, and down with him in a moment, with as much ease as Cass, in the wrestling ring at Carlisle, would throw a Bagman, and then woe to the throat of the downfallen, for thy jaws were shark-like as they opened and shut with their terrific tusks, grinding through skin and sinew to the spine.

Once, and once only--bullied out of all endurance by a half-drunken carrier--did we consent to let thee engage in a pitched battle with a mastiff victorious in fifty fights--a famous shanker--and a throttler beyond all compare. It was indeed a bloody business--now growling along the glaur of the road--a hairy hurricane--now snorting in the suffocating ditch--now fair play on the clean and clear crown of the causey--now rolling over and over through a chance-open white little gate, into a cottage-garden--now separated by choking them both with a cord--now brought out again with savage and fiery eyes to the scratch on a green plat round the signboard-swinging tree in the middle of the village--auld women in their mutches crying out, "Shame! whare's the minister?"--young women, with combs in their pretty heads, blinking with pale and almost weeping faces from low-lintelled doors--children crowding for sight and safety on the louping-on-stane--and loud cries ever and anon at each turn and eddy of the fight, of "Well done, Fro!

well done, Fro!--see how he worries his windpipe--well done, Fro!" for Fro was the delight and glory of the whole parish, and the honour of all its inhabitants, male and female, was felt to be staked on the issue--while at intervals was heard the harsh hoarse voice of the carrier and his compeers, cursing and swearing in triumph in a many-oathed language peculiar to the race that drive the broad-wheeled waggons with the high canvass roofs, as the might of Teeger prevailed, and the indomitable Fro seemed to be on his last legs beneath a grip of the jugular, and then stretched motionless and passive--in defeat or death. A mere _ruse_ to recover wind. Like unshorn Sampson starting from his sleep, and snapping like fired flax the vain bands of the Philistines, Fro whammled Teeger off, and twisting round his head in spite of the grip on the jugular, the skin stretching and giving way in a ghastly but unfelt wound, he suddenly seized with all his tusks his antagonist's eye, and bit it clean out of the socket. A yowl of unendurable pain--spouting of blood--sickness--swooning--tumbling over--and death. His last fight is over! His remaining eye glazed--his protruded tongue bitten in anguish by his own grinding teeth--his massy hind-legs stretched out with a kick like a horse--his short tail stiffens--he is laid out a grim corpse--flung into a cart tied behind the waggon--and off to the tanyard.

No shouts of victory--but stern, sullen, half-ashamed silence--as of guilty things after the perpetration of a misdeed. Still glaring savagely, ere yet the wrath of fight has subsided in his heart, and going and returning to the bloody place, uncertain whether or not his enemy were about to return, Fro finally lies down at some distance, and with bloody flews keeps licking his bloody legs, and with long darting tongue cleansing the mire from his neck, breast, side, and back--a sanguinary spectacle! He seems almost insensible to our caresses, and there is something almost like upbraiding in his victorious eyes. Now that his veins are cooling, he begins to feel the pain of his wounds--many on, and close to vital parts. Most agonising of all--all his four shanks are tusk-pierced, and, in less than ten minutes, he limps away to his kennel, lame as if riddled by shot--

"Heu quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore!"

gore-besmeared and dirt-draggled--an hour ago serenely bright as the lily in June, or the April snow. The huge waggon moves away out of the clachan without its master, who, ferocious from the death of the other brute he loved, dares the whole school to combat. Off fly a dozen jackets--and a devil's dozen of striplings from twelve past to going sixteen--firmly wedged together like the Macedonian Phalanx--are yelling for the fray. There is such another shrieking of women as at the taking of Troy. But

"The Prince of Mearns stept forth before the crowd, And, Carter, challenged you to single fight!"

Bob Howie, who never yet feared the face of clay, and had too great a heart to suffer mere children to combat the strongest and most unhappy man in the whole country--stripped to the buff; and there he stands, with

"An eye like Mars, to threaten and command;"

shoulders like Atlas--breast like Hercules--and arms like Vulcan. The heart of Benjamin the waggoner dies within him--he accepts the challenge for a future day--and retreating backwards to his clothes, receives a right-hander as from a sledge-hammer on the temple, that fells him like an ox. The other carters all close in, but are sent spinning in all directions as from the sails of a windmill. Ever as each successive lout seeks the earth, we savage schoolboys rush in upon him in twos, and threes, and fours, basting and battering him as he bawls; at this very crisis--so fate ordained--are seen hurrying down the hill from the south, leaving their wives, sweethearts, and asses in the rear, with coal-black hair and sparkling eyes, brown brany legs, and clenched iron fists at the end of long arms, swinging flail-like at all times, and never more than now, ready for the fray, a gang of Gypsies!

while--beautiful coincidence!--up the hill from the north came on, at double-quick time, an awkward squad of as grim Milesians as ever buried a pike in a Protestant. Nor question nor reply; but in a moment a general melee. Men at work in the hay-fields, who would not leave their work for a dog-fight, fling down scythe and rake, and over the hedges into the high-road, a stalwart reinforcement. Weavers leap from their treddles--doff their blue aprons, and out into the air. The red-cowled tailor pops his head through a skylight, and next moment is in the street. The butcher strips his long light-blue linen coat, to engage a Paddy; and the smith, ready for action--for the huge arms of Burniwind are always bare--with a hand-ower-hip delivery, makes the head of the king of the gypsies ring like an anvil. There has been no marshalling of forces--yet lo! as if formed in two regular lines by the Adjutant himself after the first tuilzie, stand the carters, the gypsies, and the Irishmen, opposed to Bob Howie, the butcher, the smith, the tailor, the weaver, the haymakers, and the boys from the manse--the latter drawn up cautiously, but not cowardly, in the rear. What a twinkling of fists and shillelas! what bashed and bloody noses! cut blubber lips--cheekbones out of all proportion to the rest of the face, and, through sudden black and blue tumefactions, men's changed into pigs' eyes! And now there is also rugging of caps and mutches and hair, "femineo ululatu," for the Egyptian Amazons bear down like furies on the glee'd widow that keeps the change-house, half-witted Shoosy that sells yellow sand, and Davie Donald's dun daughter, commonly called Spunkie. What shrieking and tossing of arms, round the whole length and breadth of the village!

Where is Simon Andrew the constable? Where is auld Robert Maxwell the ruling elder? What can have become of Laird Warnock, whose word is law?

And what can the Minister be about, can anybody tell, that he does not come flying from the manse to save the lives of his parishioners from cannibals, and gypsies, and Eerish, murdering their way to the gallows?

How--why--or when--that bloody battle ceased to be, was never distinctly known either then or since; but, like everything else, it had an end--and even now we have a confused dream of the spot at its termination--naked men lying on their backs in the mire, all drenched in blood--with women, some old and ugly, with shrivelled witch-like hag breasts, others young, and darkly, swarthily, blackly beautiful, with budding or new-blown bosoms unkerchiefed in the collyshangie--perilous to see--leaning over them: and these were the Egyptians! Men in brown shirts, gore-spotted, with green bandages round their broken heads, laughing, and joking, and jeering, and singing, and shouting, though desperately mauled and mangled--while Scottish wives, and widows, and maids, could not help crying out in sympathy, "Oh! but they're bonny men--what a pity they should aye be sae fond o' fechting, and a' manner o' mischief!"--and these were the Irishmen! Retired and apart, hangs the weaver, with his head over a wall, dog-sick, and bocking in strong convulsions; some haymakers are washing their cut faces in the well; the butcher, bloody as a bit of his own beef, walks silent into the shambles; the smith, whose grimy face hides its pummelling, goes off grinning a ghastly smile in the hands of his scolding, yet not unloving wife; the tailor, gay as a flea, and hot as his own goose, to show how much more he has given than received, offers to leap any man on the ground, hop-step-and-jump, for a mutchkin--while Bob Howie walks about, without a visible wound, except the mark of bloody knuckles on his brawny breast, with arms a-kimbo, seaman-fashion--for Bob had been at sea--and as soon as the whisky comes, hands it about at his own expense, caulker after caulker, to the vanquished--for Bob was as generous as brave; had no spite at the gypsies; and as for Irishmen, why they were ranting, roving, red-hot, dare-devil boys, just like himself; and after the fight, he would have gone with them to Purgatory, or a few steps further down the hill. All the battle through, we manse-boys had fought, it may be said, behind the shadow of him our hero; and in warding off mischief from us, he received not a few heavy body-blows from King Carew, a descendant of Bamfylde Moore, and some crown-cracks from the shillelas of the Connaught Rangers.

Down comes a sudden thunder-plump, making the road a river--and to the whiff o' lightning, all in the shape of man, woman, and child, are under roof-cover. The afternoon soon clears up, and the haymakers leave the clanking empty gill or half-mutchkin stoup for the field, to see what the rain has done--the forge begins again to roar--the sound of the flying shuttle tells that the weaver is again on his treddles; the tailor hoists up his little window in the thatch, in that close confinement, to enjoy the cauler air--the tinklers go to encamp on the common--"the air is balm"--insects, drooping from eave and tree, "show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold"--though the season of bird-singing be over and gone, there is a pleasant chirping hereabouts, thereabouts, everywhere; the old blind beggar, dog-led, goes from door to door, unconscious that such a stramash has ever been--and dancing round our champion, away we schoolboys all fly with him to swim in the Brother Loch, taking our fishing-rods with us, for one clap of thunder will not frighten the trouts; and about the middle or end of July, we have known great labbers, twenty inches long, play wallop between our very feet, in the warm shallow water, within a yard of the edge, to the yellow-bodied, tinsey-tailed, black half-heckle, with brown mallard wing, a mere midge, but once fixed in lip or tongue, "inextricable as the gored lion's bite."

But ever after that Passage in the life of Fro, his were, on the whole, years of peace. Every season seemed to strengthen his sagacity, and to unfold his wonderful instincts. Most assuredly he knew all the simpler parts of speech--all the household words in the Scottish language. He was, in all our pastimes, as much one of ourselves, as if, instead of being a Pagan with four feet, he had been a Christian with two. As for temper, we trace the sweetness of our own to his; an angry word from one he loved, he forgot in half a minute, offering his lion-like paw; yet there were particular people he could not abide, nor from their hands would he have accepted a roast potato out of the dripping-pan, and in this he resembled his master. He knew the Sabbath-day as well as the sexton--and never was known to bark till the Monday morning when the cock crew; and then he would give a long musical yowl, as if his breast were relieved from silence. If ever, in this cold, changeful, inconstant world, there was a friendship that might be called sincere, it was that which, half a century ago and upwards, subsisted between Christopher North and John Fro. We never had a quarrel in all our lives--and within these two months we made a pilgrimage to his grave. He was buried--not by our hands, but by the hands of one whose tender and manly heart loved the old, blind, deaf, staggering creature to the very last--for such in his fourteenth year he truly was--a sad and sorry sight to see, to them who remembered 'the glory of his stately and majestic years. One day he crawled with a moan-like whine to our brother's feet, and expired.

Reader, young, bright, and beautiful though thou be--remember all flesh is dust!

This is an episode--a tale, in itself complete, yet growing out of, and appertaining to, the main plot of Epic or Article. You will recollect we were speaking of ducks, teals, and widgeons; and we come now to the next clause of the verse--wild geese and swans.

Some people's geese are all swans; but so far from that being the case with ours--sad and sorry are we to say it--now all our swans are geese.

But in our buoyant boyhood, all God's creatures were to our eyes just as God made them; and there was ever--especially birds--a tinge of beauty over them all. What an inconceivable difference--distance--to the imagination, between the nature of a tame and a wild goose! Aloft in heaven, themselves in night invisible, the gabble of a cloud of wild geese is sublime. Whence comes it--whither goes it--for what end, and by what power impelled? Reason sees not into the darkness of instinct--and therefore the awestruck heart of the night-wandering boy beats to hear the league-long gabble that probably has winged its wedge-like way from the lakes, and marshes, and dreary morasses of Siberia, from Lapland, or Iceland, or the unfrequented and unknown northern regions of America--regions set apart, quoth Bewick we believe, for summer residences and breeding-places, and where they are amply provided with a variety of food, a large portion of which must consist of the larvae of gnats, and myriads of insects, there fostered by the unsetting sun! Now they are gabbling good Gaelic over a Highland night-moor. Perhaps in another hour the descending cloud will be covering the wide waters at the head of the wild Loch Maree--or, silent and asleep, the whole host be riding at anchor around Lomond's Isles!

But 'tis now mid-day--and lo! in that mediterranean--a flock of wild Swans! Have they dropt down from the ether into the water almost as pure as ether, without having once folded their wings, since they rose aloft to shun the insupportable northern snows hundreds of leagues beyond the storm-swept Orcades? To look at the quiet creatures, you might think that they had never left the circle of that little loch. There they hang on their shadows, even as if asleep in the sunshine; and now stretching out their long wings--how apt for flight from clime to clime!--joyously they beat the liquid radiance, till to the loud flapping high rises the mist, and wide spreads the foam, almost sufficient for a rainbow. Safe are they from all birds of prey. The Osprey dashes down on the teal, or sea-trout, swimming within or below their shadow. The great Erne, or Sea-eagle, pounces on the mallard, as he mounts from the bulrushes before the wild swans sailing, with all wings hoisted, like a fleet--but osprey nor eagle dares to try his talons on that stately bird--for he is bold in his beauty, and formidable as he is fair; the pinions that swim and soar can also smite; and though the one be a lover of war, the other of peace, yet of them it may be said,

"The eagle he is lord above, The swan is lord below!"

To have shot such a creature--so large--so white--so high-soaring--and on the winds of midnight wafted from so far--a creature that seemed not merely a stranger in that loch, but belonging to some mysterious land in another hemisphere, whose coast ships with frozen rigging have been known to visit, driving under bare poles through a month's snow-storms--to have shot such a creature was an era in our imagination, from which, had nature been more prodigal, we might have sprung up a poet. Once, and but once, we were involved in the glory of that event.

The creature had been in a dream of some river or lake in Kamtschatka--or ideally listening,

"Across the waves' tumultuous roar, The wolf's long howl from Oonalashka's shore,"

when, guided by our good genius and our brightest star, we suddenly saw him sitting asleep in all his state, within gunshot, in a bay of the moonlight Loch! We had nearly fainted--died on the very spot--and why were we not entitled to have died as well as any other passionate spirit, whom joy ever divorced from life? We blew his black bill into pieces--not a feather on his head but was touched; and like a little white-sailed pleasure-boat caught in a whirlwind, the wild swan spun round, and then lay motionless on the water, as if all her masts had gone by the board. We were all alone that night--not even Fro was with us; we had reasons for being alone, for we wished not that there should be any footfall but our own round that mountain-hut. Could we swim? Ay, like the wild swan himself, through surge or breaker. But now the loch was still as the sky, and twenty strokes carried us close to the glorious creature, which, grasped by both hands, and supporting us as it was trailed beneath our breast, while we floated rather than swam ashore, we felt to be in verity our--Prey! We trembled with a sort of fear, to behold him lying indeed dead on the sward. The moon--the many stars, here and there one wondrously large and lustrous--the hushed glittering loch--the hills, though somewhat dimmed, green all winter through, with here and there a patch of snow on their summits in the blue sky, on which lay a few fleecy clouds--the mighty foreign bird, whose plumage we had never hoped to touch but in a dream, lying like the ghost of something that ought not to have been destroyed--the scene was altogether such as made our wild young heart quake, and almost repent of having killed a creature so surpassingly beautiful. But that was a fleeting fancy--and over the wide moors we went, like an American Indian laden with game, journeying to his wigwam over the wilderness. As we whitened towards the village in the light of morning, the earlier labourers held up their hands in wonder what and who we might be; and Fro, who had missed his master, and was lying awake for him on the mount, came bounding along, nor could refrain the bark of delighted passion as his nose nuzzled in the soft down of the bosom of the creature whom he remembered to have sometimes seen floating too far off in the lake, or far above our reach cleaving the firmament.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET.

FYTTE THIRD.

O Muckle-mou'd Meg! and can it be that thou art numbered among forgotten things--unexistences!

"Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees!"

What would we not now give for a sight--a kiss--of thy dear lips! Lips which we remember once to have put to our own, even when thy beloved barrel was double-loaded! Now we sigh to think on what then made us shudder! Oh! that thy butt were but now resting on our shoulder! Alas!

for ever discharged! Burst and rent asunder, art thou now lying buried in a peat-moss? Did some vulgar villain of a village Vulcan convert thee, name and nature, into nails? Some dark-visaged Douglas of a henroost-robbing Egyptian, solder thee into a pan? Oh! that our passion could dig down unto thee in the bowels of the earth--and with loud lamenting elegies, and louder hymns of gratulation, restore thee, buttless, lockless, vizyless, burst, rent, torn, and twisted though thou be'st, to the light of day, and of the world-rejoicing Sun! Then would we adorn thee with evergreen wreaths of the laurel and the ivy--and hang thee up, in memory and in monument of all the bright, dim, still, stormy days of our boyhood--when gloom itself was glory--and when--But

"Be hush'd my dark spirit! for wisdom condemns, When the faint and the feeble deplore."

Cassandra--Corinna--Sappho--Lucretia--Cleopatra--Tighe--De Stael--in their beauty or in their genius, are, with millions on millions of the fair-faced or bright-souled, nothing but dust and ashes; and as they are, so shall Baillie, and Grant, and Hemans, and Landon be--and why vainly yearn "with love and longings infinite," to save from doom of perishable nature--of all created things, but one alone--Muckle-mou'd Meg!

After a storm comes a calm; and we hasten to give the sporting world the concluding account of our education. In the moorland parish--God bless it--in which we had the inestimable advantage of passing our boyhood--there' were a good many falcons--of course the kite or glead--the buzzard--the sparrowhawk--the marsh harrier--that imp the merlin--and, rare bird and beautiful! there, on a cliff which, alas! a crutched man must climb no more, did the Peregrine build her nest. You must not wonder at this, for the parish was an extensive one even for Scotland--half Highland half Lowland--and had not only "muirs and mosses many o," but numerous hills, not a few mountains, some most extraordinary cliffs, considerable store of woods, and one, indeed, that might well be called the Forest.