ell of slaughter, we shall crack their sconces with our
Crutch. No apologies, Hamish--'tis only making the matter worse; but we
expected better things of the Dogs. O'Bronte! fie! fie! sirrah. Your
sire would not have fallen asleep during a speech of ours--and such a
speech!--he would have sat it out without winking--at each more splendid
passage testifying his delight by a yowl. Leap over the Crutch, you
reprobate, and let us see thee scour. Look at him, Hamish, already
beckoning to us on his hurdies from the hill-top. Let us scale those
barriers--and away over the table-land between that summit and the head
of Gleno. No sooner said than done--and here we are on the level--such a
level as the ship finds on the main sea, when in the storm-lull she
rides up and down the green swell, before the trade-winds that cool the
tropics. The surface of this main land-sea is black in the gloom, and
green in the glimmer, and purple in the light, and crimson in the
sunshine. O, never looks Nature so magnificent

"As in this varying and uncertain weather,
When gloom and glory force themselves together,
When calm seems stormy, and tempestuous light
At day's meridian lowers like noon of night!"

Whose are these fine lines? Hooky Walker, OUR OWN. Dogs!
Down--down--down--be stonelike, O Shelty!--and Hamish, sink thou into
the heather like a lizard; for if these old dim eyes of ours may be in
aught believed, yonder by the birches stands a Red-Deer snuffing the
east wind! Hush! hush! hush! He suspects an enemy in that airt--but
death comes upon him with stealthy foot, from the west; and if Apollo
and Diana--the divinities we so long have worshipped--be now propitious,
his antlers shall be entangled in the heather, and his hoofs beat the
heavens. Hamish, the rifle! A tinkle as of iron, and a hiss accompanying
the explosion--and the King of the Wilderness, bounding up into the air
with his antlers higher than ever waved chieftain's plume, falls down
stone-dead where he stood; for the blue-pill has gone through his
vitals, and lightning itself could hardly have withered him into more
instantaneous cessation of life!

He is an enormous animal. What antlers! Roll him over, Hamish, on his
side! See, up to our breast, nearly, reaches the topmost branch. He is
what the hunter of old called a "Stag of Ten." His eye has lost the
flash of freedom--the tongue that browsed the brushwood is bitten
through by the clenched teeth--the flee