ry dream of toil and trouble, of which the smiles, the sighs,
the tears, the groans, were all alike vain as the forgotten sunbeams and
the clouds! Fifty years and more are gone--and this is the Twelfth of
August Eighteen hundred and twenty-eight; and all the Highland mountains
have since dawn been astir, and thundering to the impetuous sportsmen's
joys! Our spirit burns within us, but our limbs are palsied, and our
feet must brush the heather no more. Lo! how beautifully these
fast-travelling pointers do their work on that black mountain's breast!
intersecting it into parallelograms, and squares, and circles, and now
all a-stoop on a sudden, as if frozen to death! Higher up among the
rocks, and cliffs, and stones, we see a stripling, whose ambition it is
to strike the sky with his forehead, and wet his hair in the misty
cloud, pursuing the ptarmigan now in their variegated summer-dress, seen
even among the unmelted snows. The scene shiftsand high up on the heath
above the Linn of Dee, in the Forest of Braemar, the Thane--God bless
him--has stalked the red-deer to his lair, and now lays his unerring
rifle at rest on the stump of the Witch's Oak. Never shall Eld deaden
our sympathies with the pastimes of our fellow-men any more than with
their highest raptures, their profoundest griefs. Blessings on the head
of every true sportsman on flood, or field, or fell; nor shall we take
it at all amiss should any one of them, in return for the pleasure he
may have enjoyed from these our Fyttes, perused in smoky cabin during a
rainy day, to the peat-reek flavour of the glorious Glenlivet, send us,
by the Inverness coach, Aberdeen steam-packet, or any other rapid
conveyance, a basket of game, red, black, or brown, or peradventure a
haunch of the red-deer.

Reader! be thou a male, bold as the Tercel Gentle--or a female, fair as
the Falcon--a male, stern as an old Stag--or a female, soft as a young
Doe--we entreat thee to think kindly of Us and of our Article--and to
look in love or in friendship on Christopher in his Sporting Jacket, now
come to the close of his Three Fyttes, into which he had fallen--out of
one into another--and from which he has now been revived by the
application of a little salt to his mouth, and then a caulker. Nor think
that, rambling as we have been, somewhat after the style of thinking
common in sleep, there has been no method in our madness, no _lucidus
ordo_ in our dream. All the pages are instinct with one