TAIN TO INVERNESS. 87 



beasts to go as straw-treaders into the East Lothian, 

 as the condition precedent to receiving the wedders. 



The new street from the station has given great 

 life to Inverness as far as appearance goes. We like 

 best to be there a day or two before " the twelfth/' 

 when the shooters are arriving, and holding myste- 

 rious confabs with stalwart keepers, and when some 

 of the youthful hands are on parade in bran-new 

 knickerbockers, and intensely pleased with their legs. 

 It is always High 'Change at Hugh Snowie's on these 

 days, and in fact throughout the season. There sits 

 the veteran behind his shop- desk, with a large file of 

 letters about moors and deer forests to let, at his side 

 both learning and detailing the latest on dits of the 

 trigger. The crack deer heads of the previous sea- 

 son keep, in conformity with custom, their silent 

 vigil of knights on his walls for twelve months and a 

 day. His henchman, Colin Read, has turned out 

 three-and-twenty annual sets of about six dozen each, 

 and he is still working in his little laboratory behind. 

 The tameless eye and the defiant snort of the forest- 

 kings fade into very sober prose while they are put 

 through his crucible. Some were waiting their turn 

 most ignominiously, in boxes full of al,um and shav- 

 ings; the skins of others had reached the higher 

 stage of soaking in a preparation of arsenic, while 

 the jaw-bones were seething in a cauldron ; and tow, 

 tin, and putty as props for the mouth completed the 

 post-mortem picture. A vigorous spring followed by 

 a summer drought, as in '64, is of course sadly against 



