48

SPORT AT DALNACARDOCH.

and reaching from my hip to my instep, smote the heather, like a flail, into a shower of blossoms.

North. Was there a cloud of witnesses?

Tickler. To be sure there was.

me from the mountain-sides.

A hundred stills beheld Shepherd and smuggler cheered me like voices in the sky; and the old genius of the solitary place rustled applause through the reeds and rushes, and birch-trees among the rocks-paced up and down the shore in triumph. . . .

2

North. What a subject for the painter! Oh! that Sir Thomas Lawrence,1 or our own John Watson, had been there to put you on canvass! Or, shall I rather say, would that Chantrey had been by to study you for immortal marble!

Tickler. Braced by the liquid plunge, I circled the tarn at ten miles an hour. Unconsciously I had taken my Manton into my hand—and unconsciously reloaded—when, just as I was clearing the feeder-stream, not less than five yards across, up springs a red-deer, who, at the death of the eagle, had cowered down in the brake, and wafted away his antlers in the direction of Benvoirlich. We were both going at the top of our speed when I fired; and the ball piercing his spine, the magnificent creature sunk down, and died almost without a convulsion.

North. Red-deer, eagle, and pike, all dead as mutton!

Tickler. I sat down upon the forehead, resting an arm on each antler-Sancho sitting with victorious eyes on the carcass. I sent him off to the tarn-side for my pocket-pistol, charged with Glenlivet, No. 5. In a few minutes he returned, and crouched down with an air of mortification at my feet.

North. Ho! ho! the fairies have spirited away your nether integuments!

Tickler. Not an article to be seen!-save and except my shoes!-Jacket, waistcoat, flannel shirt, breeches, all melted away with the mountain dew. There was I like Adam in Paradise, or,

"Lady of the Mere,

Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance."

North. Did not the dragon-flies attack you the winged ants-and the wasp of the desert?

1 Sir Thomas Lawrence died in 1830.

2 Afterwards Sir John Watson Gordon, President of the Royal Scottish Academy.

Tickler. A figure moved along the horizon-a female figure -a Light and Shadow of Celtic Life—and, as I am a Christian, I beheld my buckskin breeches dangling over her shoulders. I neared upon the chace, but saw that Malvina was making for a morass. Whiz went a ball within a stride of her petticoats, and she deflected her course towards a wood on the right. She dropped our breeches. I literally leaped into them; and, like Apollo in pursuit of Daphne, pursued my impetuous career.

North. To Diana! to Diana ascends the virgin's prayer! Tickler. Down went, one after the other, jacket, waistcoat, flannel shirt,-would you believe it, her own blue linseywoolsey petticoat. Thus lightened, she bounded over the little knolls like a bark over Sicilian seas; in ten minutes she had fairly run away from me hull-down, and her long yellow hair, streaming like a pendant, disappeared in the forest.

North. What have you done with the puir lassie's petticoat?

Tickler. I sent it to my friend Dr M'Culloch to lie among his other relics.

North. The Doctor is a clever man; but those four volumes1 of his are too heavy a load for the shoulders of the public. Besides, the Doctor does not always speak the truth. You have perhaps seen the Examination of his Tour?

The ex

Tickler. Shrewd, searching, sarcastic, severe. aminer―said to be a literary gentleman of the name of Brown -gets the Doctor's head into Chancery in the first round, and continues at grievous head-work during the contest, which is short, the Doctor slipping through his arms exhausted. An ugly customer!

North. People writing up books from old worm-eaten weather-stained journals, must fall into many blunders―misstatements-misrepresentations. The examiner charges the Doctor with wilful falsehood—and as he backs his charge with proofs most ably led, the Doctor's character as a man of veracity does at this present moment stand in need of vigorous vindication.

1 The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland. By JOHN M'CULLOCH, M.D. 2 A Critical Examination of Dr M'Culloch's Work on the Highlands of Scotland. By JAMES BROWN, LL.D., Advocate, author of The History of the Highlands and Highland Clans.

VOL. I.

D

50

A HINT TO HIGHLAND TOURISTS.

Tickler. One piece of insolence he never can do away with. Throughout all the four volumes, he addresses himself with the most nauseating familiarity to Sir Walter Scott, as if the illustrious Baronet had been his bosom-friend.

Sir Walter," is the order of the page.

North. That would sicken a horse.

"You and I,

Tickler. In narrating conversations with Highlanders, the aim of which dramas is to expose them to ridicule, he always represents them as employing the Lowland dialect. Why not assert they spoke French or Hebrew ?

North. His attempts against wit are most atrocious. Heaven protect us! do you suppose he talks so in company?

Tickler. Anybody that did not know the worthy Doctor so well as I do, would, I think, guess him to be a monstrous miser. Everybody, according to his account, is in league to cheat him-and one cannot read twenty pages of his work without figuring to oneself the Doctor plodding along warily, with his hand in his breeches' pocket, securing his silk purse, made out of a sow's-ear, from violation. Did he never reflect on the extreme poverty of the Highlanders in many remote moors and mountains, and understand the cause and character of their love of money? Is it less excusable in them than in himself?

North. If idle folks will wander over the Highlands, and get the natives to show them how to follow their noses through the wildernesses, ought they not to pay handsomely for being saved from perdition, in bogs, quagmires, mosses, shelving lake-shores, fords, and chasms?

Ticker. Undoubtedly; and if the orphan son of some old Celt, who perhaps fought under Abercromby, and lost his eyes in ophthalmia, leave his ordinary work beside his shieling, be it what it may, or give up a day's sport on the hill or river to accompany a Sassenach' some thirty miles over the moors, with his bit nag too loaded with mineralogy and botany, and all other matter of trash, are five shillings, or twice five, a sufficient remuneration? Not they indeed. Pay him like a post-chaise, fifteenpence a-mile, and send him to his hut rejoicing through a whole winter.

North. Spoken like a gentleman. So, with boats, a couple 1 Sassenach-a Lowlander or Englishman.

JOYS OF DALNACARDOCH.

51

of poor fellows live, and that is all, by rowing waif and stray Sassenachs over lochs, or arms of the sea. No regular ferry, mind you. Perhaps days and weeks pass by without their boat being called for-and yet grumble and growl is the go as soon as they hold out a hand for silver or gold. Recollect,

old or young hunks, that you are on a tour of pleasure—that you are as fat as a barn-door fowl; and these two boatmen— there they are grinding Gaelic-as lean as laths;—what the worse will you be of being cheated a little? But if you grudge a guinea, why, go round by the head of the loch, and twenty to one you are never seen again in this world.

Tickler. The Highlanders are far from being extortioners. An extraordinary price must be paid for an extraordinary service. But, oh! my dear North, what grouse-soup at Dalnacardoch! You smell it on the homeward hill, as if it were exhaling from the heather;-deeper and deeper still, as you approach the beautiful chimney vomiting forth its intermitting columns of cloud-like peat-smoke, that melts afar over the wilderness!

North. Yes, Tickler-it was Burke that vindicated the claims of smells to the character of the sublime and beautiful. Tickler. Yes, yes! Burke it was. As you enter the inn, the divine afflatus penetrates your soul. When up-stairs, perhaps in the garret, adorning for dinner, it rises like a cloud of rich distilled perfumes through every chink on the floor, every cranny of the wall. The little mouse issues from his hole, close to the foot of the bed-post, and raising himself, squirrel-like, on his hinder-legs, whets his tusks with his merry paws, and smooths his whiskers.

North. Shakespearean!

Tickler. There we are, a band of brothers round the glorious tureen! Down goes the ladle into "a profundis clamavi," and up floats from that blessed Erebus a dozen cunningly resuscitated spirits. Old cocks, bitter to the back-bone, lovingly alternating with young pouts, whose swelling bosoms might seduce an anchorite!

North (rising). I must ring for supper. Ambrose-Ambrose

-Ambrose !

Tickler. No respect of persons at Dalnacardoch! I plump them into the plates around sans selection. No matter al

52

HIGHLAND FEELING.-WATERFALLS.

though the soup play JAWP' from preses to croupier. There, too, sit a few choice spirits of pointers round the board-Don -Jupiter-Sancho-"and the rest"-with steadfast eyes and dewy chops, patient alike of heat, cold, thirst, and hunger-dogs of the desert indeed, and nose-led by unerring instinct right up to the cowering covey in the heather groves on the mountain-side.

North. Is eagle good eating, Timothy? Pococke the traveller used to eat lion lion pasty is excellent, it is said-but is not eagle tough?

Tickler. Thigh good, devilled. The delight of the Highlands is in the Highland feeling. That feeling is entirely destroyed by stages and regular progression. The waterfalls do not tell upon sober parties-it is tedious in the extreme to be drenched to the skin along high-roads-the rattle of wheels blends meanly with thunder-and lightning is contemptible, seen from the window of a glass coach. To enjoy mist, you must be in the heart of it as a solitary hunter, shooter, or angler. Lightning is nothing unless a thousand feet below you, and the live thunder must be heard leaping, as Byron says, from mountain to mountain, otherwise you might as well listen to a mock peal from the pit of a theatre. North. The Fall of Foyers is terrible-a deep abyss, savage rock-works, hideous groans, ghost-like vapours, and a rumble as if from eternity.

2

Tickler. The Falls of the Clyde are majestic. Over Corra Linn the river rolls exultingly; and, recovering itself from that headlong plunge, after some troubled struggles among the shattered cliffs, away it floats in stately pomp, dallying with the noble banks, and subsiding into a deep bright foaming current. Then what woods and groves crowning the noble rocks! How cheerful laughs the cottage pestered by the spray! and how vivid the verdure on each ivied ruin! The cooing of the cushats is a solemn accompaniment to the cataract, and aloft in heaven the choughs reply to that voice of the Forest.

1 Jawp-splash.

2 In his "Address to a Wild Deer," Professor Wilson says of the hunter:

""Tis his, by the mouth of some cavern his seat,

The lightning of heaven to hold at his feet,

While the thunder below him that growls from the cloud,

To him comes on echo more awfully loud."