kilt drawn gently; I took no notice--but a more decided pull made me look round:--MacLellan motioned up the slope, and I saw the points of a good head passing behind a little ridge, about eighty yards away. I looked back at the hart--he was just moving to the hill. What would I have given to have diminished a hundred and fifty yards of the distance which divided us! He passed slowly down the back of the eminence and disappeared, and the gathering herd streamed after him. '_O Chìal! A Chìal!_' exclaimed the forester--'_bithidh è air fàlbh!_' The stag whose horns I had seen had come out from behind the ridge, and stood with his broad side towards me, gazing at the herd; but as they moved away, he now began to follow. The disappearance of the great hart, and the disappointment of MacLellan, recalled me to the last chance. I followed the retreating stag with my rifle, passed it before his shoulder, whiz went the two-ounce ball, and he rolled over headlong in the heath, on the other side of the knoll, which the next stretch would have placed between us. I looked to the hill above: the whole herd was streaming up the long green hollow in its west shoulder headed 'by the mighty of the desert.' They rounded and passed the brow, and sloped upward on the other side, till the forest of heads appeared bristling along the sky-line of the summit. In a few moments afterwards, as the sun was going down upon Scùr-na-Lapaich, and the far western hills of Loch Duaich, the terrible wide-forked tree came out in the clear eastern sky on the top of the hill, and, crowding after, at least two hundred heads--crossing, and charging, and mingling--their polished points flashing in the parting sunbeams, and from many a horn, the long steamers of the moss fluttering and flying like the pennons and bannerolles of lances. The herd continued to file along the ridge of the hill, and wheeling below the crest, countermarched along the sky-line, till their heads and horns slowly decreased against the light." With such a book as this before us, we could go on alternately commenting and extracting until we had broken the back of the Number. Even now we are dying to pilfer the account of the late Glengarry's course with "Black Dulochan," and the no less exciting history of the three day's ruse with a roebuck. But abstinence is a virtue which is forced upon us in the present instance, rather from the lack of space than from any exercise of voluntary discretion; and we shall now leave the deer without further molestation for a season, hoping soon to encounter them in person with our rifle somewhere about the skirts of Cairn-Gorm.