uarry twenty feet deep, and as many high; yet "without
stop or stay, down the rocky way," the hunter train flows on; for the
music grows fiercer and more savage--lo! all that remains together of
the pack, in far more dreadful madness than hydrophobia, leaping out of
their skins, under insanity from the scent, for Vulpes can hardly now
make a crawl of it; and ere he, they, whipper-in, or any one of the
other three demoniacs, have time to look in one another's splashed
faces, he is torn into a thousand pieces, gobbled up in the general
growl; and smug, and smooth, and dry, and warm, and cosy, as he was an
hour and twenty-five minutes ago exactly, in his furze bush in the
cover--he is now piecemeal in about thirty distinct stomachs; and is he
not, pray, well off for sepulture?

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET.

FYTTE SECOND.

We are always unwilling to speak of ourselves, lest we should appear
egotistical--for egotism we detest. Yet the sporting world must
naturally be anxious to know something of our early history--and their
anxiety shall therefore be now assuaged. The truth is, that we enjoyed
some rare advantages and opportunities in our boyhood regarding
field-sports, and grew up, even from that first great era in every
Lowlander's life, Breeching-day, not only a fisher but a fowler; and it
is necessary that we enter into some interesting details.

There had been from time immemorial, it was understood, in the Manse, a
duck-gun of very great length, and a musket that, according to an old
tradition, had been out both in the Fifteen and Forty-five. There were
ten boys of us, and we succeeded by rotation to gun or musket, each boy
retaining possession for a single day only; but then the shooting season
continued all the year. They must have been of admirable materials and
workmanship; for neither of them so much as once burst during the Seven
Years' War. The musket, who, we have often since thought, must surely
rather have been a blunderbuss in disguise, was a perfect devil for
kicking when she received her discharge; so much so, indeed, that it was
reckoned creditable for the smaller boys not to be knocked down by the
recoil. She had a very wide mouth--and was thought by us "an awfu'
scatterer;" a qualification which we considered of the very highest
merit. She carried anything we chose to put into her--there still being
of all her performances a loud and favourable report--balls, buttons,
chucky-stanes, s