206 AUGUST ON THE MOORS 



thing to quaff the elixir of life and renew the boyish 

 enthusiasm of your youth on a single morning in the 

 three hundred and sixty-five. You are hardly less 

 excited than those couples of young setters who are 

 positively moaning and trembling with delirious joy 

 as they crouch and wriggle in their couples. A care- 

 lessly indifferent appetite for breakfast, although per- 

 haps on second thoughts the dinner of yesterday may 

 have something to do with that. No matter. There 

 is an ambulatory larder in the ample panniers slung to 

 the shaggy pony, and if we should chance to climb, as 

 may well happen, to where even those sure-footed 

 limbs of his dare hardly follow us, his burden can 

 always be transferred to the broad shoulders of the 

 gillies. Meanwhile, if you can't buttress your back 

 with a substantial meal, there is no difficulty about 

 disposing of that brimming tumbler, and you silence 

 any scruples of your slightly morbid liver by dashing 

 the creaming milk with Glenlivat or old Jamaica. 

 There is music in the snap of the locks of your 

 breech-loader such music as you have not listened to 

 for some months or more ; and yet since you listened 

 to it last you may have lolled in many an opera-stall, 

 and yawned critical approval of sublime symphonies at 

 many a classical concert. But, looking after it tenderly, 

 you part with your gun to a brawny member of your 

 Gaelic tail. You know, by long experience, the hills 

 you are condemned to mount before you begin your 

 beat hills that would try the steel and whipcord of the 

 red deer, to say nothing of those flaccid calves of yours. 



