, his precious stag.
Alas! when Mr. Macleay was so kind as to take him behind into the
workshop--which resembled a huge shambles, almost--and when, from among
the vast number of heads and horns lying and hanging everywhere around,
the Strathaivron head was at last produced, Lionel was horribly shocked
and disappointed. Was this, then, his trophy that he hoped to have hung
up for the admiration of his friends and his own ecstatic
contemplation--this twisted, shapeless, sightless lump of hide and hair,
with a great jaw of discolored teeth gleaming from under its flabby
folds? It is true that here were the identical horns, for had he not
gone lovingly over every tine of them?--but was this rag of a thing all
that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather?
However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him. He was shown the various
processes and stages of the taxidermist's art, the amorphous mass of
skin and hair gradually taking shape and substance until it stood forth
in all its glory of flaming eye and proud nostril and branching antlers;
and he was highly pleased to be told that this head he had got in
Strathaivron was a fairly good one, as stags now go in the North. So,
all his shopping being done, he set off again for the Station Hotel,
where he got what he wanted in the shape of dinner, followed by a long
and meditative smoke in the billiard-room, with visions appearing among
the curls of blue vapor.

What the Highland Railway manages to do with the trains which it
despatches from Inverness at 10 P.M. and reproduces the next morning at
Perth about 7, it is impossible for the mind of man to imagine; but it
is not of much consequence so long as you are snugly ensconced in a
sleeping-berth; and Lionel passed the night in profound oblivion. With
the new day, however, these unavailing and torturing regrets began
again; for now he felt himself more completely than before shut off from
the friends he had left; and Strathaivron and all its associations and
pursuits had grown distant like a dream. He was lucky enough, on this
southward journey, to get a compartment to himself; and here was an
excellent opportunity for him to have practised his _vocalises_; but it
was not of _vocalises_, nor of anything connected with the theatre, that
he was thinking. He was much franker with himself now. He no longer
tried to conceal from himself the cause of this vague unrest, this
useless looking back and longing, this curi