and we warn our readers, if ever they meet with it in any neglected corner of garden or field, to show it no mercy at all, for it is of an unmerciful nature itself, killing every blade of grass it comes in contact with, and choking unto the death every other vegetable that it can surmount and master. The finest stag's head and antlers that we have ever seen form a trophy in the possession of our neighbour, Mr. Bill, Kilmalieu, the magnificent "monarch of the waste" that bore them having fallen to that gentleman's own rifle in Glengour two or three years ago. The other day, however, we were shown a set of larger horns, though not quite so handsome perhaps, or so faultless in spread and curve, and unfortunately imperfect from the loss of one of the tines, which was picked up by a shepherd in the Black Mount Forest many years ago. The size of beam throughout was something extraordinary, and one could not help regretting that it had not the head and neck attached, that it might be set up in the style for which the good city of Inverness has of recent years become so famous. Such a trophy of the chase, complete in all its parts, would have deserved the place of honour amid a thousand such trophies in the noblest hall in the kingdom. As we handled these antlers, and poised them at arm's length with admiration, the thought suddenly struck us that Edmund Waller, the poet, must have had some such magnificent trophy before him when he burst into the following apostrophe, in which a well-known fact in the natural history of the animal is so happily interwoven with the old mythological legend:-- "O fertile head! which every year Could such a crop of wonder bear! The teeming earth did never bring So soon so hard, so huge a thing: Which, might it never have been cast, Each year's growth added to the last, These lofty branches had supplied, The earth's bold sons' prodigious pride; Heaven with these engines had been scal'd When mountains heaped on mountains failed." Lines, by the way, that would form a most happy and appropriate inscription for any really fine trophy of this kind.