the case may be, be sure you have before you the gamest, varmintest little beggars to tackle otter, fox, or badger that the whole world can show. Our visitor of the other day had only one little fellow of his pack along with him. "What's his name, Donald?" we asked, pointing to his wiry follower, that we could easily see was, from the ink-black tip of his nose to the extremity of his tail, a "varmint" of the first order. "What do you call him?" "Speach," he replied, and speach, our non-Gaelic readers must be told, means a wasp or hornet, and, even like a wasp, we knew that that little fellow with his dander up in the labyrinthine recesses of a fox's den or a badger's garaidh, would fight against any odds until he was torn into ribbons, and on each and every occasion would prove himself "Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer," which old Robertson of Struan admirably rendered into our native Doric, without the loss of a particle of meaning or force-- "A fiery ettercap, a fractious chiel, As het as ginger, and as stieve as steel!" "And is 'Speach' good, then, Donald?" we inquired. "Yes, sir," was the reply, "a very good little dog. He is but small, you see, and light; the smallest, indeed, at present in my pack, but he will take hold of fox or badger or otter at the readiest spot that offers, and, having once got hold, will never let go again while his antagonist is in life; at every dig only burying his muzzle deeper into his opponent." We quite agreed with him that a dog that did that must be good indeed; and we are perfectly satisfied that he did not in the least exaggerate the indomitable pluck and never-say-die tenacity of his tiny favourite. Two very good things remain to be said in praise of our Highland fox-hunters' dogs. They are never known to bite, and very rarely even to bark at human beings; and no fox-hunter's dog was ever known to be affected with hydrophobia or canine madness. The exemption from canine madness may, perhaps, be largely due to their open air and natural mode of life, but it is difficult to understand why they should be so entirely free from any propensity to bite or otherwise annoy a human being, a vice common enough to dogs of unexceptionable character and breeding otherwise, and from which even the highly intelligent and much-lauded collie is by no means so free as his many admirers seem to suppose. Even a collie is always prepared to bark, and oftentimes to bite on very little provocation, or no provocation at all. The fox-hunter's terrier, whether he is pure or a nondescript cross, very rarely indeed barks at a stranger, and never under any circumstances offers to bite. We question if there is a human being to-day in life who can honestly assert that he has ever been bitten by a fox-hunter's dog. With Macdonald we had a long and interesting crack, in the course of which we touched on some matters of sufficient importance to be introduced to the reader on a future occasion.