That sentence is enough to make a sportsman start to his feet if it were but whispered to him in his deepest after-dinner doze. In “The Book of the Seasons” I asserted that sportsmen felt the animating influence of nature and its beauty in their pursuits. For that passage many have been the gentle lectures of the tender-hearted; but that it was a true passage has been shewn by the thanks which many sportsmen have given me for that simple vindication, and by the repeated quotation of the whole article in their books. That they do feel it, is plainly shewn in many papers of the sporting magazines; but nowhere more vividly than in “The Oakleigh Shooting Code.” If the unction with which the paper on grouse-shooting is written in that book were more diffused through works of the like nature, vain would be all arguments to check the love of shooting. The feeling on this subject has been evidenced by the avidity with which that part of the book has been quoted far and wide. But the spirit of the picturesque is not more prominent in these chapters than in the description of Oakleigh Hall, and of the “wide-ranging treeless view of the smooth-turfed limestone hills, the white rocks breaking out in patches, so characteristic of Derbyshire.” But we are pausing on our way to the Highlands; and surely nothing can be so inspiring and exciting in the whole circle of sporting scenes as a trip to the moors and mountains of the north, in the height of summer--in the beauty of summer weather, and in the full beauty of the scenery itself. If the season is fine--the roads are dry--the walks are dry--the bogs are become, many of them, passable, the heather is in full bloom, the fresh air of the mountains, or the waters in sailing thither, the rapid changes of scene, the novel aspects of life and nature in progressing onward, by the carriage, the railway, the steamer, with all their varying groups of tourists and pleasure-seekers, of men of business and men of idleness, are full of enjoyment. To the man from the rich monotonous Lowlands, from the large town, from the heart of the metropolis perhaps, from the weary yoke of business, public or private, of law, of college study, of parliament and committees, what can be more penetrating and delicious than the breathing of the fresh buoyant air, the pleasant flitting of the breeze, the dash of sunny waters, the aspect of mountains and moors in all their shadow and gloom, or in their brightness as they rise in their clear still beauty into the azure heavens, or bask broad and brown in the noon-sun? There go the happy sportsmen; seated on the deck of some fast-sailing steamer, with human groups around them; they are fast approaching the “land of the mountain and the flood.” They already seem to tread the elastic turf, to smell the heather bloom, and the peat fire of the Highland hut; to climb the moory hill, to hear the thunder of the linn, or pace the pebbly shore of the birch-skirted lake.