for black-game-fruitless attempt, there they were not to be found. Spean, being a Scotch dog of mature age, might have seen blackgame. Prince, a wild young black-and-tan, had certainly never seen one, and was quite new to a woodland. I had killed grouse over him last year, and I knew his nose to be excellent. This day I had Spean out, as two dogs are, in Norway, useless, or rather do mischief, as you can hardly attend to one dog. The heat was intense, and he was very fat, and in no condition; so he shut up in the middle of the day, lay down, and took a snooze, and did not come home till feedingtime in the evening. Altogether, the first day was to me not a very successful one, and the bag not large. All I got by that day's shooting was the most awful cramp I ever in my life experienced, so bad that I really thought myself dead, and that I was going to leave my bones in Norway.

After this first essay I took counsel with myself, and having seen that the gentleman who undertook to show you where the game lay, knew precious little about it, determined to depend on nothing but myself and dog. I ascertained that though the black-game might be on the flats and edges of the dense cover

in the morning before you were up, that during shooting hours they were in very inaccessible parts of the forest and ravines, where were plenty of juniper and other berries. Your Norwegian blackcock is decidedly fond of fun. He is not easy to be found by your dog, who is left a great deal to his own diversions; and when he does find, you can't see over a hill or a ravine the other side, or through no end of spruce fir. Then when at last you do see your dog, you have to get to him through strong impediments of not the nicest walking in the world, even for young legs-rock intermixed with wood, charming stumps of cutdown trees, and sometimes trees on the ground, cut or blown down; and, worst of all, the roots of trees laid along the paths and tracks, like springes set for snipes, just high enough to catch your toe and send you sprawling! Given you get to your dog, I'll back a Norwegian blackcock to put a tree between you and him quicker than any Killarney woodcock puts a holly bush in your way, and that is saying a good deal. Now these were hard lines for poor "Sixty-one," who now, alas! adds thirteen more years to that respectable age. Added to this, Prince, his dog, was a young gentleman of scarce two years old, that had

seen little of the world, and had no knowledge of woodlands or black-game, and was a wildish blade. But he had a wonderful nose, and a strong affection for his master, whom he never lost, and would turn to whistle like a shepherd's colley.

The prospect and the cramp of the first day's shooting almost beat me, but, like the gentleman in the parlour singing, I persevered, and found it answer, and I never had the cramp again in Norway. My bags were not large as the blackcocks don't swarm: you are not perpetually letting off your gun, and if you kill half you shoot at, you may consider yourself lucky, therefore my bags were, as I said, not gigantic. And yet I do solemnly declare that I got completely enamoured of this sport. The scenery was beautiful-wood, rock, water, loch after loch, connected with one another by lovely streams, that at last emptied themselves into the sea, almost everywhere to be seen. Not only were there the high hills around to look upon, but, beyond, the grander mountains backing them up formed such a picture, that at times I fancied myself transported into fairyland. There was a stillness, too, in these parts, that I never remember anywhere else, where I have been; and I can understand how it

is that the silent solitude of the backwoods in America first strikes the emigrant. There you were with your dog-you two left to your own inventions, with no one to interfere with you, to circumvent anything from a jacksnipe to a deer. I had, however, no sport worth recording: but I did get a capercailzie, and that in a queer way.

Prince was, as I said, a queer dog; and one day we had been toiling through a jungle, up hill, on emerging from which I saw him, not standing, evidently, but looking from the top of the hill intently at something underneath him. I got to him as soon as I could, and we walked on together, stopping and looking. At the bottom of the hill rose an immense hawk, I should say as large as the Highland Gled. I fired and tickled him, but he declined leaving the place, and wheeled towards Prince and self, when I gave him the other barrel ; which, though it did not drop him instantly, yet settled him; and I saw him evidently falling over into the ravine, from which we had just emerged. I telegraphed to the gillie-a strange one, unfortunately, that day, my own not being able to come with me to mark him, which he seemed to understand. I then looked for Prince, whom I descried at last at the bottom of the hill; and

from his way I knew he had something not alive. So, instead of looking to my hawk, I went to him; when I found him standing over a dead capercailzie, a hen, fresh-killed, quite warm, and ripped from the head to the shoulder as if it had been cut. It was almost plucked about the breast, where the hawk had just commenced at the flesh, when we disturbed his dinner so inopportunely. I put him in my pocket and went to look for my hawk. I found my charming gillie intent on picking juniper berries-the only thing he ever did-knowing about as much of the whereabouts of his fall as the berries he was eating. I had lost my exact bearings; and though I hunted, and so did Prince, for two hours, I never could find him, though I saw him falling dead. I was provoked, as I should have liked to have had the two specimens stuffed, as a memorial of an odd occurrence. It did not make me more enamoured of this berry-eating animal; and I rebelled against any future company with this particular gentleman. Whenever he went with me, his only idea was going where there were most juniper berries, and when he got among these he stopped. I had been in hopes that the quantities he ate would have disordered his stomach and kept him at home, but as they