Hurra!--Heron--hurra! why, that was an awkward tumble--and very nearly had we hold of thee by the tail! Didst thou take us for a water-kelpie? A fright like that is enough to leave thee an idiot all the rest of thy life. 'Tis a wonder thou didst not go into fits--but thy nerves must be sorely shaken--and what an account of this adventure will certainly be shrieked unto thy mate, to the music of the creaking boughs! Not, even wert thou a secular bird of ages, wouldst thou ever once again revisit this dreadful place. For fear has a wondrous memory in all dumb creatures--and rather wouldst thou see thy nest die of famine, than seek for fish in this man-monster-haunted pool. Farewell! farewell! Many are the hundreds of hill and mountain lochs to us as familiarly known, round all their rushy or rocky margins, as that pond there in the garden of Buchanan Lodge. That pond has but one goose and one gander, and nine goslings--about half-a-dozen trouts, if indeed they have not sickened and died of Nostalgia, missing in the stillness the gurgle of their native Tweed--and a brace of perch, now nothing but prickle. But the lochs--the hill, the mountain lochs now in our mind's eye and our mind's ear,--heaven and earth! the bogs are black with duck, teal, and widgeon--up there "comes for food or play" to the holla of the winds, a wedge of wild geese, piercing the marbled heavens with clamour--and lo! in the very centre of the mediterranean, the Royal Family of the Swans! Up springs the silver sea-trout in the sunshine--see Sir Humphrey!--a salmon--a salmon fresh run in love and glory from the sea!