Of some half-dozen bird-catchers, or bird-fanciers, as they prefer calling themselves, that visit the West Highlands professionally from time to time, our favourite is Mackenzie, a north countryman, we believe, as one indeed might readily guess from his surname, and well enough known, we daresay, in and about Inverness, where during our last visit we noticed with pleasure--for it is a good sign of a people--that birds in cages were exceedingly common. "Old Cowie," another of the fraternity, is a respectable man, with more knowledge, perhaps, of things in general than any of his brethren that have chanced to come our way; but for a knowledge of our native wild-birds, their favourite haunts, food, song, and individual habits--idiosyncrasies--for a knowledge, we say, precise and accurate to the most astonishing degree on all those matters, you may trust Mackenzie, for he is far and away at the head of his class, positively unrivalled by any one else that we ever met with. Of the ornithology of books, of ornithology as a science, with its systems, classifications, genera, and species, he knows nothing, of course, but he knows every bird you can refer to under some favourite provincial cognomen, and he knows it so thoroughly that no one could possibly know it better. It is true that he knows little or nothing but birds, but he knows them so well (the birds of Scotland), so intimately, from constant intercourse with them in their native haunts and homes, that a "crack" with him about them, when once you get him fairly started, is no ordinary treat to any one so interested in all that concerns our wild-birds as we are, and have been for well-nigh a quarter of a century. Remembering that bird-catching is a sort of profession or trade, by which a livelihood, however precarious, is encompassed, an affair of demand and supply, with the usual prosaic result of pounds, shillings, and pence--or rather of shillings and pence without the pounds, these last seldom tickling the palms or troubling the purses of the order--one would expect to find the bird-catcher a dull, mechanical rogue, a mere bird-trapper and bird-seller in the dearest market, with no more of poetry or sentiment about him than about a white-aproned poulterer. This, however, is far from being the case, at least not always nor even frequently, for Mackenzie, "Old Cowie," and others that we could name, really and truly love birds for their own sakes, without a thought frequently of their market value, and you can gather as you converse with them from their frequent references to the delights as well as the désagréments of their profession, that they are by no means either unconscious of or indifferent to the poetry of birds and bird life in their native haunts, whether on moor or mountain side, by solitary tarn or stream, in copse and wildwood, amid the wildernesses of inland mountains or by the margin of the sea. We never knew any one so correctly and minutely conversant with