A "deck" of cards is produced and a quartette betake themselves to whist with half-crown stakes on the rubber and sixpenny points. This was mild speculation to that which was engaged in on the homeward journey after the market, when a Strathspey sheep-farmer won £8 between Dalvey and Forres. As my friends shuffle and deal, I look out of window at the warm gray towers of the cathedral, beautiful still spite of the desecrating hand of the "Wolf of Badenoch." Our road lies through the fertile "Laigh of Moray," one of the richest wheat districts in the Empire and as beautiful as fertile. At Alves we pick up a fresh, hale gentleman, who is described to me as "the laird of three properties," bought for more than £100,000 by a man who began life as the son of a hillside crofter. We pass the picturesque ruins of Kinloss Abbey and draw up at Forres station, whose platform is thronged with noted agriculturists bound for the "Character" Fair. Here is that spirited Englishman Mr. Harris of Earnhill, whose great cross ox took the cup at the Agricultural Hall seven or eight years ago; and the brothers Bruce--he of Newton Struthers, whose marvellous polled cow beat everything in Bingley Hall at the '71 Christmas Show and but for "foot and mouth" would have repeated the performance at the Smithfield Show; and he of Burnside who likewise has stamped his mark pretty deeply in the latter arena. At Forres we first hear Gaelic; for a train from Carr Bridge and Grantown in Upper Strathspey has come down the Highland Railway to join ours, and the red-haired Grants around the Rock of Craigellachie--where a man whose name is not Grant is regarded as a _lusus naturae_--are Gaelic speakers to a man. No witches accost us, and speaking personally I feel no "pricking of the thumbs" as we skirt the blasted heath on which Macbeth met the witches; the most graphic modern description of which on record was given to Henry Dixon in the following quaint form of Shakespearean annotation: "It's just a sort of eminence; all firs and ploughed land now; you paid a toll near it. I'm thinking, it's just a mile wast from Brodie Station."