beautiful in its mottled plumage, running in front of us, stopping now and again and peering around; the old cock-grouse rising with his warning described above, which too often brings the stalk to an untimely end; the many insects, some of them so strange and weird, that we see as we lie flat gazing into a clump of grass and moss; the granite boulders sparkling in the sunlight as if studded with many diamonds--most, if not all, of these things I saw in this particular stalk. Everything, however, comes to an end, and so at last I succeeded in getting a shot at the heaviest of the stags, who was standing on the side of a very rocky and precipitous hill. He ran a few yards and fell down dead. It was, indeed, fortunate that he fell where he did, caught between two rocks, for immediately below these rocks nothing could have stopped him from rolling down a precipice of several hundred feet, and, as old Angus said, the venison would not have been worth taking home and the horns would have been smashed to atoms. The stag, an old one in good condition, was dragged down to a place where the pony could come up, and, leaving Angus to find and help the pony boy, the stalker and I started to work our way homewards across the hill. We had been moving slowly onwards, spying from time to time, when we discovered a large number of stags feeding below us. A circuitous stalk brought us up to them, but in a very awkward position. It was impossible to get a shot, except by coming up to a point at the top of the hill below which they were feeding, and we should then be much too close to them. There was, however, no choice, and after a cautious crawl we reached a point from which we could see the horns of stags moving away from us, at a distance of not more than 30 yards. Crawling as flat as possible to the top of the little hill, the stalker slowly raised his head, and as slowly lowered it. He then whispered to me, “There’s a fine stag there, but he won’t wait long, and you’d better shoot over my back.” I cautiously raised the rifle over the stalker’s back in the direction indicated, and, slowly raising my head, saw a fine stag, with a good head, standing broadside on, about 70 yards away, looking straight at me. As quickly as possible I covered the stag’s heart and pulled the trigger; there was the unmistakable thud as the bullet struck the stag, who instantly turned and disappeared. “He’ll be all right,” said the stalker; “you don’t often hear a bullet strike more distinctly than that one did,” and on reaching the point where the stag had been standing we saw him about 80 yards below, lying dead. He turned out to be a royal, with very regular points and a good head, although he was going back and had evidently been better. Like two of the four stags I had previously shot, he was an ancient warrior. The mist, which had temporarily lifted, now came down again thicker than ever, and the stalker said that we should have an awful job to get the stag down, as it