that this one must have come from a different shooting altogether; it was not a Clebrig eagle at all. But he looked at the fierce eye of the beast, and its undaunted mien; he knew that, if it could, it would fight to the death; and he felt a kind of pride in the creature, and admiration for it, and even a sort of sympathy and fellow-feeling. ’My good chap,’ said he, ’I’m not going to kill you in cold blood—not me. Go back to your wife and weans, wherever they are. Off!’ And he tried to throw the big beast into the air. But this was not like flinging up a released pigeon. The eagle fell forward, and stumbled twice ere it could get its great wings into play; and then, instead of trying to soar upward, it went flapping away down wind—increasing in speed, until he could see it, now rising somewhat, cross the lower windings of Loch Naver, and make away for the northern skies. ’It’s a God’s mercy,’ he was saying to himself, as he went back to get his gun, ’that I met the creature in the daytime; had it been at night, I would hae thought it was the devil.’ Some two or three hundred feet still farther up the hillside he came to his own eyrie—a great mass of rock, affording shelter from either southerly or easterly winds, and surrounded with some smaller stones; and here he sate contentedly down to look around him—Harry crouched at his feet, his nose between his paws, but his eyes watchful. And this wide stretch of country between Clebrig and the northern sea would have formed a striking prospect in any kind of weather—the strange and savage loneliness of the moorlands; the solitary lakes with never a sign of habitation along their shores; the great ranges of mountains whose silent recesses are known only to the stag and the hind; but on such a morning as this it was all as unstable and unreal as it was wildly beautiful and picturesque;—for the hurrying weather made a kind of phantasmagoria of the solid land; bursts of sunlight that struck on the yellow straths were followed by swift gray cloud-wreaths blotting out the world; and again and again the white snow-peaks of the hills would melt away and become invisible only to reappear again shining and glorious in a sky of brilliant blue; until, indeed, it seemed as if the earth had no substance and fixed foundation at all, but was a mere dream, an aerial vision, changed and moved and controlled by some unseen and capricious hand.