workmanship of a Manton and a Lancaster--American
rifles, with their stocks more richly silver-chased than you could have
thought within reach of the arts in that young and prosperous
land--duck-guns, whose formidable and fatal length had in Lincolnshire
often swept the fens--and on each side of the door, a brass carronade on
idle hours to awaken the echoes--sitting erect on their hurdies,
deer-hound, greyhound, lurcher, pointer, setter, spaniel, varmint, and
though last, not least, O'Bronte watching Christopher with his steadfast
eyes, slightly raised his large hanging triangular ears, his Thessalian
bull dewlaps betokening keen anxiety to be off and away to the mountain,
and with a full view of the white star on his coal-black breast;--

"Plaided and plumed in their tartan array"

our three chosen Highlanders, chosen for their strength and their
fleetness from among the prime Children of the Mist--and Tickler the
Tall, who keeps growing after threescore and ten like a stripling, and
leaves his mark within a few inches of the top of the pole, arrayed in
tights of Kendal green, bright from the skylight of the inimitable
Vallance or the matchless Williams--green too his vest, and green also
his tunic--while a green feather in a green bonnet dances in its airy
splendour, and gold button-holes give at once lustre and relief to the
glowing verdure (such was Little John, when arrayed in all his glory; to
walk behind Robin Hood and Maid Marian, as they glided from tree to
tree, in wait for the fallow-deer in merry Sherwood)--North in his
Quaker garb--Quaker-like all but in cuffs and flaps, which, when he goes
to the Forest, are not--North, with a figure combining in itself all the
strength of a William Penn, _sans_ its corpulency, all the agility of a
Jem Belcher with far more than a Jem Belcher's bottom--with a face
exhibiting in rarest union all the philosophy of a Bacon, the
benevolence of a Howard, the wisdom of a Wordsworth, the fire of a
Byron, the gnosticity of a John Bee, and the up-to-trappishness combined
not only with perfect honesty, but with honour bright, of the Sporting
Editor of _Bell's Life in London_--and then, why if Wilkie or Simpson
fail in making a GEM of all that, they are not the men of genius we took
them for, that is all, and the art must be at a low ebb indeed in these
kingdoms.

Well, our Tail has taken wings to itself and flown away with Dugald Dhu
and Donald Roy; and we, with Hamish Bhan,