o golden eagles--a _bonne bouche par excellence_, so to
say. They do not get it every day, or every month, for the matter of
that--at least, not in these islands of enlightenment, for the wild cat
shares with them the honor of being a martyr of Fate, and it is on the
_index expurgatorius_ of the gamekeeper also.

But, I give you my word, those two mighty birds left that wild cat
uneaten. I say "left" him advisedly, for it was rather a matter that
they had left him than that they did leave him. Anyway, they were not
near him, not anywhere near him, and I suppose they went. There had
arisen a noise as if all Regent Street had at that moment rustled its
combined "silk foundations," and--there were our eagles far, far away,
and in opposite directions, melting quicker than real sugar-knobs in hot
grog into the haze of the distant sky.

And after that the Chieftain and his wife glided up into the setting sun
till it swallowed them in a red glory, and when the sun had burnt itself
out, swam--swam stupendously and wonderfully--through ether down to bed.
Bed with them that night consisted in sitting, regally enthroned among
clouds, upon a black, rock bastion exactly above a clean drop of not much
more than six hundred feet, and rocked by "the wracked wind-eddies" of
the mountain-tops. The good God who made all things--even the animal
that had fired at them--alone knows what they dreamt about, that superb,
intolerant, fierce, haughty, implacable couple.

* * * * * *

Now, the man, the--er--lord of creation, who had fired that shot--in
fact, all those shots that day--was Pig Head, the back-to-the-lander from
the South. Pig Head argued that deer forests are farms lying idle. And
the laird had offered to rent him a farm at one-and-nothing-three the
acre to disprove it. Pig Head had taken the offer. He disapproved of
lairds as unrevolutionaries. He hated red deer because they were too
smart for him to kill wholesale, and he loathed golden eagles because
they were the pride of the "hills." But he kept his opinions to himself,
because he valued his neck. The People of the Hills would have stretched
it very much longer than his own long tongue if he hadn't. In his heart
he also hated the "oppressed" People of the Hills for that they loved
their laird, regarded deer-stalking as a religious rite, and--wore kilts!

As a matter of fact, Pig Head's farm never grew anything more than some
clingi