"Substantial breakfast!" by Dugald Dhu, and by Donald Roy, and by Hamish Bhan--heaped up like icebergs round the pole. How nobly stands in the centre that ten-gallon Cask of Glenlivet! Proud is that Round to court his shade. That twenty-pound Salmon lies beneath it even as yesterday he lay beneath the cliff, while a column of light falls from him on that Grouse-Pie. Is not that Ham beautiful in the calm consciousness of his protection? That Tongue mutely eloquent in his praise? Tap him with your knuckles, tenderly as if you loved him--and that with all your heart and soul you do--and is not the response firm as from the trunk of the gnarled oak? He is yet "Virgin of Proserpina"--"by Jove" he is; no wanton lip has ever touched his mouth so chaste; so knock out the bung, and let us hear him gurgle. With diviner music does he fill the pitcher, and with a diviner liquidity of light than did ever Naiad from fount of Helicon or Castaly, pour into classic urn gracefully uplifted by Grecian damsel to her graceful head, and borne away, with a thanksgiving hymn, to her bower in the olive-grove. All eggs are good eating; and 'tis a vulgar heresy which holds that those laid by sea-fowl have a fishy taste. The egg of the Sew-mew is exceeding sweet; so is that of the Gull. Pleasant is even the yolk of the Cormorant--in the north of England ycleped the Scarth, and in the Lowlands of Scotland the Black Byuter. Try a Black Byuter's egg, my dear boy; for though not newly laid, it has since May been preserved in butter, and is as fresh as a daisy after a shower. Do not be afraid of stumbling on a brace of embryo Black Byuters in the interior of the globe, for by its weight we pronounce it an egg in no peril of parturition. You may now smack your lips, loud as if you were smacking your palms, for that yellow morsel was unknown to Vitellius. Don't crush the shell, but throw it into the Etive, that the Fairies may find it at night, and go dancing in the fragile but buoyant canoe, in fits of small shrill laughter, along with the foam-bells over the ebb-tide Rapids above Connal's raging Ferry. The salmon is in shivers, and the grouse-pie has vanished like a dream. "So fades, so languishes, grows dim, and dies, All that this world is proud of!" Only a goose remains! and would that he too were gone to return no more; for he makes us an old man. No tradition survives in the Glen of the era at which he first flourished. He seems to have belonged to some tribe of the Anseres now extinct; and as for his own single individual self, our senses tell us, in a language not to be misinterpreted, that he must have become defunct in the darkness of antiquity. But nothing can be too old for a devil--so at supper let us rectify him in Cayenne.