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Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, a kinsman of the Chief of Argyll, in whom a love of deer-stalking seems to have gradually expanded into dimensions too gigantic to be satisfied with any thing less than the stalking of the lion, the elephant, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, or the rhinoceros.

Few things can be drearier to the outsider than the conversation of cricketers, unless it be the recondite lore which whist-players bring forth from the depths of their extraordinary memories. But angling talk has a variety, recounts an amount of incident and adventure, and wakens a feeling of free air in a way with which the records of no other sport, except perhaps deer-stalking, can compete.

There is little to record of the happy sojourn in the North this year, with its deer-stalking, riding and driving, except that Hallam, the historian, and Baron Liebig, the famous chemist, visited Sir James Clark, the Queen's physician, at Birkhall, which he occupied, and were among the guests at Balmoral.

I am thinking they got some word oat o' the island what was intended I sought every glen and clench, as if I had been deer-stalking, but teil a want of his coat-tail could I see Cot tam!"

A deer-stalking peace drooped upon everything, and in it a man could invoke the passing of a lazy pageant of twenty years of his life. The dignity of a coffin being lowered into a grave surrounded the ultimate appearance of the lift. The expert we in America call the elevator-boy stepped from the car, took three paces forward, faced to attention and saluted.

He had taken life by the throat, and excesses of various kinds having shattered his frame, there was an end, for the time being, of deer-stalking and tigers; it was a tame period of rat-hunts with those terriers whose murderous energies were a pis aller, yielding a sort of vicarious pleasure. Then the pony was saddled, and I rode down for the grand field day.

It had seasoned everything, twined round everything, great and small a day's trout-fishing or deer-stalking; a new book, a friend, a famous place; then politics, and the joys of power. Gone!

Still the difference exists, not so much in the character of the bird as in the features of the country. It is the wild aspect of the heathery moor without a bound, except the rugged outline of the mountains upon the sky, that gives such a charm to the grouse-shooting in Scotland, and renders the deer-stalking such a favourite sport among the happy few who can enjoy it.

"You are a witch," said he, "or else you have been deer-stalking yourself.

Only think of how you would dress yourself if you were going out deer-stalking, and you will come to something of this kind barring the pockets of your shooting-coat, which are certainly inadmissible, from motives of military neatness and discipline; and barring, too, the buttoning up to the chin, which, on the mountain's side, you had perhaps rather dispense with; but which the soldier must adhere to, if he would keep up the essential degree of stiffness and smartness of dress.