family, manufacturing his own goods into nourishing and sustaining ale, heavily punished for his untaxed enjoyment of the bounties of Providence; whereas, in the other case, the poacher, as a rule, is a person with a turn for idleness, an aversion to all honest and steady labour, and a taste for luxurious indulgences above his means, who persists in illegally invading another's property in the pursuit and seizure of its produce. This character is specially applicable to the poaching class in the Highlands. Any one familiar with prosecutions in poaching cases there must see that the offenders brought up for trial form a limited list of mean-spirited cringing creatures, upon whom any sort of sympathy would be sadly thrown away, whose faces are well known to the procurator-fiscal as they appear in rather regular succession in the dock. It may be said that almost nine poaching prosecutions out of ten are instituted against old and habitual offenders, who calculate, like blockade runners, that a few successful raids will enable them cheerfully to pay the fines inflicted on the occasions of their capture. As deer-stalking and grouse shooting, to be effective, require day-light, and pheasant breeding is the exception not the rule in the north, cases of night poaching, the worst and most severely punishable, are of unfrequent occurrence, while fines of two pounds, the highest that can be inflicted for day poaching, in the most aggravated cases, is not heavy enough even when coupled with costs to make habitual and systematic poaching an altogether unprofitable occupation. We have no difficulty therefore in saying that the Game Laws do not press with undue severity upon the labouring classes in the Highlands, by whom, on the whole, poaching is now an offence rarely committed; and we believe that in saying so we express the opinion of those classes themselves. Any complaints that have been made have not proceeded from them but from third parties who have endeavoured to range themselves as pretended friends to compass their own ends. There is just one direction in which we might hint that improvement is possible. We would wish to see a sliding scale of fines legalised, by which lighter penalties would be exigible for first offences and repeated transgressions less leniently punishable than at present.