ithout rousing my sluggish cat to a joyful response. It is Dutch
courage with the birds and beasts of the glen, hard driven for food;
but I look attentively for them in these long forenoons, and they have
begun to regard me as one of themselves. My breath freezes, despite my
pipe, as I peer from the door; and with a fortnight-old newspaper I
retire to the ingle-nook. The friendliest thing I have seen to-day is
the well-smoked ham suspended from my kitchen rafters. It was a gift
from the farm of Tullin, with a load of peats, the day before the snow
began to fall. I doubt if I have seen a cart since.

This afternoon I was the not altogether passive spectator of a curious
scene in natural history. My feet encased in stout "tackety" boots, I
had waded down two of Waster Lunny's fields to the glen burn: in summer
the never-failing larder from which, with wriggling worm or garish fly,
I can any morning whip a savoury breakfast; in the winter-time the only
thing in the valley that defies the ice-king's chloroform. I watched
the water twisting black and solemn through the snow, the ragged ice on
its edge proof of the toughness of the struggle with the frost, from
which it has, after all, crept only half victorious. A bare wild
rosebush on the further bank was violently agitated, and then there ran
from its root a black-headed rat with wings. Such was the general
effect. I was not less interested when my startled eyes divided this
phenomenon into its component parts, and recognized in the disturbance
on the opposite bank only another fierce struggle among the hungry
animals for existence: they need no professor to teach them the
doctrine of the survival of the fittest. A weasel had gripped a
water-hen (whit-rit and beltie they are called in these parts) cowering
at the root of the rose-bush, and was being dragged down the bank by
the terrified bird, which made for the water as its only chance of
escape. In less disadvantageous circumstances the weasel would have
made short work of his victim; but as he only had the bird by the tail,
the prospects of the combatants were equalized. It was the tug-of-war
being played with a life as the stakes. "If I do not reach the water,"
was the argument that went on in the heaving little breast of the one,
"I am a dead bird." "If this water-hen," reasoned the other, "reaches
the burn, my supper vanishes with her." Down the sloping bank the hen
had distinctly the best of it, but a