s Dalwhinnie moors, stretching away, by long Loch Ericht side,
into the dim and distant day that hangs, with all its clouds, over the
bosom of far Loch Rannoch. Is that the pluffer at partridge-pouts who
had nearly been the death of poor Ponto? Lord Kennedy himself might take
a lesson now from the straight and steady style in which, on the
mountain brow, and up to the middle in heather, he brings his Manton to
the deadly level! More unerring eye never glanced along brown barrel!
Finer forefinger never touched a trigger! Follow him a whole day, and
not one wounded bird. All most beautifully arrested on their flight by
instantaneous death! Down dropped right and left, like lead on the
heather--old cock and hen, singled out among the orphaned brood, as
calmly as a cook would do it in the larder from among a pile of plumage.
No random shot within--no needless shot out of distance--covered every
feather before stir of finger--and body, back, and brain, pierced,
broken, shattered! And what perfect pointers! There they stand, still as
death--yet instinct with life--the whole half-dozen! Mungo, the
black-tanned--Don, the red-spotted--Clara, the snow-white--Primrose, the
pale yellow--Basto, the bright brown, and Nimrod, in his coat of many
colours, often seen afar through the mists like a meteor.

So much for the Angler's and the Shooter's Progress--now briefly for the
Hunter's. Hunting, in this country, unquestionably commences with cats.
Few cottages without a cat. If you do not find her on the mouse watch
at the gable end of the house just at the corner, take a solar
observation, and by it look for her on bank or brae--somewhere about the
premises--if unsuccessful, peep into the byre, and up through a hole
among the dusty divots of the roof, and chance is you see her eyes
glittering far-ben in the gloom; but if she be not there either, into
the barn and up on the mow, and surely she is on the straw or on the
baulks below the kipples. No. Well, then, let your eye travel along the
edge of that little wood behind the cottage--ay, yonder she is!--but she
sees both you and your two terriers--one rough and the other
smooth--and, slinking away through a gap in the old hawthorn hedge in
among the hazels, she either lies _perdu_, or is up a fir-tree almost as
high as the magpie's or corby's nest.

Now, observe, shooting cats is one thing, and hunting them is
another--and shooting and hunting, though they may be united, are here
treat