make amends for it by shooting just as much too ill another; and thus,
at the close of the week, we can go to bed with a clear conscience. In
short, we shoot like gentlemen, scholars, poets, philosophers as we are;
and looking at us, you have a sight

"Of him who walks (rides) in glory and in joy,
Following his dog upon the mountain-side,"--

a man evidently not shooting for a wager, and performing a match from
the mean motive of avarice or ambition, but blazing away "at his own
sweet will," and, without seeming to know it, making a great noise in
the world. Such, believe us, is ever the mode in which true genius
displays at once the earnestness and the modesty of its character.--But,
Hamish--Hamish--Hamish--look with both thine eyes on yonder bank--yonder
sunny bank, beneath the shade of that fantastic cliff's superincumbent
shadow--and seest thou not basking there a miraculous amount of the
right sort of feathers? They have packed, Hamish--they have packed,
early as it yet is in the season; and the question is--_What shall we
do?_ We have it. Take up a position--Hamish--about a hundred yards in
the rear--on yonder knoll--with the Colonel's Sweeper. Fire from the
rest--mind, from the rest, Hamishright into the centre of that bed of
plumage, and we shall be ready, with Brown Bess and her sister, to pour
in our quartette upon the remains as they rise--so that not escape shall
one single feather. Let our coming "to the present" be your
signal.--Bang! Whew!--what a flutter! Now take that--and that--and
that--and that! Ha! Hamish--as at the springing of a mine, the whole
company has perished. Count the dead. Twenty-one! Life is short--and by
this compendious style we take Time by the forelock. But where the devil
are the ducks? Oh, yes! with the deer at the Still. Bag, and be
stirring. For the Salmon-pond is murmuring in our ear; and in another
hour we must be at Inveraw. Who said that Cruachan was a steep mountain?
Why, with a gentle, smooth, and easy slope, he dips his footsteps in the
sea-salt waters of Loch Etive's tide, as if to accommodate the old
gentleman who, half-a-century ago, used to beard him in his pride on his
throne of clouds. Heaven bless him!--he is a kind-hearted mountain,
though his forehead be furrowed, and his aspect grim in stormy weather.
A million memories "o' auld lang syne" revive, as almost "smooth-sliding
without a step" Surefoot travels through the sylvan haunts, by us
beloved of yore,