If we say that the season of ingathering will be later than usual by ten days, or a fortnight at the most, we are probably not far from the mark. But, late or early, it is sure to be an exceedingly abundant harvest, there being at present all over the West Highlands every promise of very heavy returns, the heaviest, perhaps, that, under any circumstances whatever, the land could safely bear, with the hope of an eventually fully ripe and lusty maturity. Readers of our Nether Lochaber papers will in nowise be surprised to hear that we have all our lifetime made it a point to cultivate the confidence and friendly goodwill of keepers, foresters, and their followers, wherever we chanced to meet with them; nor would it be proper to suppress our grateful acknowledgment of the fact that to them we have been largely indebted in all our zoological studies for a long quarter of a century. We look upon foresters and gamekeepers as at the head of their profession, what the French call "princes of the game," and we have ever found them exceedingly courteous and kind, highly intelligent almost without exception, and not merely willing but well pleased to be examined, and cross-examined when occasion calls, on anything and everything appertaining to, or at all connected with, their office. With their humbler brethren of the craft, too, we have long been thoroughly en rapport; these humbler brethren being the fox-hunters, mole-catchers, and vermin-killers generally, by whatever name or designation known from the Moray Firth, to the Clyde. Most readers of poetry will remember how Pope, in one of his finest poems (Prologue to the Satires), apostrophises his friend Dr. Arbuthnot as "Friend to my life! which did not you prolong, The world had wanted many an idle song." And if one dared to parody any couplet from a poem so beautiful, we should be disposed to address the first fox-hunter or mole-catcher of our numerous acquaintances among them who are deacons of their craft, we chanced to meet, in some such words as these-- "Friend to my mill! which did not you supply With frequent grist, I'd wither, wane, and die."