I retained the lease of a shooting-box and of a few miles of deer-forest by the Deeside, between Ballater and picturesque little Loch Muick. Larkhall, as the house was called, became, therefore, our yearly rendezvous. On our second meeting, the party was increased by a new member, Mr. William Fussell, a gentleman who was 'something in the City.' I never could quite make out what that something was, but it must have been some exceedingly pleasant and lucrative profession, since Mr. Fussell, while constantly describing himself as one of the unlucky ones, was always in spirits high, not to say rollicking, and was gifted with powers of enjoyment which could only be the result of long and assiduous practice. I had met him at a German hotel, where I had been struck by the magnificent insolence of his assertion that he had acquired a thorough command of the German language in three weeks, and by the astonishing measure of success which attended his daring plunges into that tongue. He was serenely jolly, selfish, and sociable, pathetically complaining of his wife's conduct in letting him come away for his holiday by himself, and enjoying himself very much without her. He was so envious of my good fortune when I said that I was going boar-hunting, that I invited him to accompany me; and as he showed much pluck in a rather nasty encounter we had with an infuriated boar, and much frankness in owning afterwards that he was frightened, I forthwith invited him to Scotland, and he accepted the invitation, as he did all good things which came in his way, with avidity. At the third of our yearly meetings a fifth and last member joined us. This was a clever young Irishman, of good family, small fortune, sickly body, and still sicklier mind, to whom accident had put me under a small obligation, which I was glad to repay by enabling him to visit the Highlands, to which his doctor had prescribed a visit. He had been making an exhaustive and strictly philosophical inquiry into the iniquities of Paris, in the corruption of which he appeared to revel; indeed, he was clever enough to find so much depravity in every spot he had visited, that I wondered what repulsive view he would be able to take of our sweet-scented fir-forests, and the long miles of the rippling winding Dee; or whether, in the absence of labyrinthine mazes of dirt and disease, vice and crime to explore and minutely expose, he would pine and die.