his
skull-cap and scatter his brains. 'Tis done--and the eyry is orphan'd.
Let the small brown moorland birds twitter Io Paean, as they hang
balanced on the bulrushes--let the stone-chat glance less fearfully
within shelter of the old grey cairn--let the cushat coo his joyous
gratitude in the wood--and the lark soar up to heaven, afraid no more of
a demon descending from the cloud. As for the imps in the eyry, let them
die of rage and hunger--for there must always be pain in the world; and
'tis well when its endurance by the savage is the cause of pleasure to
the sweet--when the gore-yearning cry of the cruel is drowned in the
song of the kind at feed or play--and the tribes of the peace-loving
rejoice in the despair and death of the robbers and shedders of blood!

Not one fowler of fifty thousand has in all his days shot an Eagle. That
royal race seems nearly extinct in Scotland. Gaze as you will over the
wide circumference of a Highland heaven, calm as the bride's dream of
love, or disturbed as the shipwrecked sailor's vision of a storm, and
all spring and summer long you may not chance to see the shadow of an
Eagle in the sun. The old kings of the air are sometimes yet seen by the
shepherds on cliff or beneath cloud; but their offspring are rarely
allowed to get full-fledged in spite of the rifle always lying loaded in
the shieling. But in the days of our boyhood there were many glorious
things on earth and air that now no more seem to exist, and among these
were the Eagles. One pair had from time immemorial built on the
Echo-cliff, and you could see with a telescope the eyry, with the rim of
its circumference, six feet in diameter, strewn with partridges,
moorfowl, and leverets--their feathers and their skeletons. But the
Echo-cliff was inaccessible.

"Hither the rainbow comes, the cloud,
And mists that spread the flying shroud,
And sunbeams, and the flying blast,
That if it could, would hurry past,
But that enormous barrier binds it fast."

No human eye ever saw the birds within a thousand feet of the lower
earth; yet how often must they have stooped down on lamb and leveret,
and struck the cushat in her very yew-tree in the centre of the wood!
Perhaps they preyed at midnight, by the light of the waning moon--at
mid-day, in the night of sun-hiding tempests--or afar off, in even more
solitary wilds, carried thither on the whirlwind of their own wings,
they swept off their prey from uninhabit