200 AUGUST ON THE MOORS 



gentlemen who shoot for the spit, the poulterer's stall, 

 and the paragraph. 



Very different is it with our favourite moor. It lies 

 well-nigh lost in the wild heart of the mountains, 

 although a beaten high-road does skirt its pathless 

 solitudes. In these days of political miracle and 

 perpetual surprise, even in stagnant holiday-time, the 

 hermit must compromise with civilization. But it is 

 five-and-forty miles from the nearest railway-station, and 

 there is no danger of confounding the scream of the 

 hunting eagle with the distant whistle of the panting 

 engine. From the blue summits of its high land you 

 catch glimpses of the distant Atlantic down loch- 

 bottomed glens, sacred to the red deer ; too distant, 

 though, to distinguish the smoke of the tourist-laden 

 steamer from the light wreaths of the rain-clouds that 

 are always floating in the west on the sunniest of summer 

 days. Not that you don't have quite as much of the 

 tourist as your misanthrophy cares to see. You buy 

 your mutton from your neighbour the innkeeper ; but 

 the " machine " that daily drops your beef and other 

 foreign delicacies at your gates, lumbers along the road, 

 heavily laden with excursionists. Luckily, as yet, the 

 guide-books have not damned your selfish solitude to 

 fame. No embarrassed chieftain, who saw his way to 

 filling his sporran at the cost of the banished dynasty, 

 ever set up his standard in the peaceful glens, nor 

 was its easy-principled, light-fingered population ever 

 annihilated wholesale in sweeping and summary 

 vengeance. It may come to be another thing 



