We had also a visit some little time ago from Sandy Macarthur, a well-known mole-catcher in Lochaber and the neighbouring districts; a very intelligent and civil man, whose only fault is that when you have collared him there is no spontaneity in his crack. Even when you have got firm hold enough of him, you have to extract his frequently very valuable information from him by a process akin to that which an ingenious and learned counsel employs in the case of a recalcitrant and unwilling witness at an important jury trial. Sandy, however, is a good fellow all the same, slow but sure; and his quiet unobtrusiveness and reticence is perhaps to be attributed to the exigencies of his profession; a "rattling, roaring Willie" of a mole-catcher, with, to use a Gaelic phrase, his tongue constantly on his shoulder, would probably prove but an unsuccessful hunter of the velvet-coated quick-eared, and timid subterranean family of the Mac Talpa. Sandy, on the contrary, goes to work in dead silence and a-tiptoe, and bags his mole as quietly as an angler baskets his trout from out the glassy pool, over which, if but his shadow moved, he would angle long in vain. Sandy assures us that moles are to be found this season where they were never seen before, and where he was at first a good deal puzzled to account for their appearance. On a full consideration of the case Macarthur's theory is briefly to this effect: Moles are mainly underground dwellers, and even their travelling and migrating from place to place are done subterraneously. If, however, they find themselves, as in the Highlands they must frequently do, in a district or part of district separated from other parts in which they have never been by rocky spurs and ridges, they will not venture over these latter unless they carry sufficient earth to hide their tunnelling, which, it is needless to say, they frequently do not. The mole in such a case remains insulated, a prisoner, so to speak, within his present domain. Last winter and spring, however, according to Sandy's theory, the snow lay so deep and lay so long, that the moles took advantage of the fact, and making their tunnels under the snow, where it lay on spur and ridge, just as if it had been so much superincumbent soil, they easily got into fresh fields and pastures new. In this way alone can Sandy account for the appearance of moles this summer in places into which hitherto they had no means of ready access; and he may be right, though it is a point in the natural history of the Talpa well deserving further investigation. Sandy further avers that moles sometimes swim across rivers, fresh-water lakes, and even arms of the sea in their migrations; and this is just possible, though we took the liberty of expressing ourselves slightly incredulous. Sandy, however, ought to know; he has spent the best part of a life already approaching its grand climacteric in the careful and close and constant study of, as one may say, a single animal--to wit,