BIRD LIFE, ETC. 185 



tempest ; the enlivening heat of summer and the 

 cramping frosts of winter have come over them — how 

 often one cannot tell. In the midst of them has the 

 half-savase Celt of the olden time shot his arrow into 

 the stately stag ; and but yesterday has the smooth- 

 faced and trimly-clad Saxon sent from his rifle, as he 

 leant against one of their trunks, the whizzing messenger 

 of death to the herd that reposed in peace upon the 

 mossy knoll. Farther on, many trees lie prostrate on 

 the hillside among a scattered group of melancholy 

 survivors ; and yet farther up the valley the ground is 

 covered with trunks, erect, but decayed, broken down, 

 shaggy with moss and lichen, rotten to the core, and 

 crumbling under the action of the weather. Said I not 

 well, that trees harmonise with human feelings ? He 

 who for the hundredth time could pass by such a scene 

 and not experience its depressing effect must have a 

 heart unfit for any gentle emotion. A trumpet could 

 not more forcibly proclaim the inevitable death of all 

 organic being than do these lifeless and silent monu- 

 ments of ruin. — Natural History of Deeside, p. 169. 



32. — The Wind in the Beallach-bhui 



Forest. 



Once more in the Beallach-bhui forest, I seat myself 

 on a mossy bank and gaze around. I am in the middle 

 of a seeming amphitheatre of hills, formed of ranges 

 extending from Craig Clunie, on the right, up to the 



