LOCH CRERAN. 



favourite flower, my dear, but we're not going there to 

 pluck them, so you must e'en sniff the evening air, and 

 fancy the odours from the wild honey-suckle are wafted 

 hitherwards, and that you are better to leave the daring 

 flowers in their point of vantage, where the dwellers in 

 the woodland can enjoy their fragrance. Yon are 

 suggesting stiffened joints and youth departed ; but we 

 are only contemplative, we assure you, and are startled 

 at thus discovering our simple, hardy, native plant, with 

 its wrinkled, cordage stem, feeding its honey-laden head 

 at a height to which the bright stranger we have been 

 discoursing about cannot yet aspire, with us. 



The deer eat the Tropceolum, as they eat almost every 

 other green thing, and what they do not eat the rascals 

 destroy with their feet and horns, out of apparent mischief. 

 Not always do they come by a righteous retribution ; but 

 that black fellow that hopped so lightly over that wire 

 fence, and waxed so fat on forbidden turnips, and seemed 

 to flourish, in despite the direst anathemas, what became 

 of him that he ceased to "lard the lean earth" as he sped 

 along to his daily meal ? Perhaps the dogs that enjoyed 

 the venison know best, as the " black fellow " hung with 

 his heels on the wires and his nose in the little swamp 

 alongside, out of which position he could not extricate 

 his fat carcase. How he must have bemoaned his weak- 

 ness for cultivation and turnips, and wished he had stuck 

 to the hillside and the heather ! We turn from the 

 stream, with the lycopodium growing far up the stems of 

 the trees on its banks, and revel in the rich hay crop, 

 with as much on one acre as last year showed on three. 

 For if the year has been uncertain and backward in the 

 eyes of pleasure-loving humanity, the crops as a whole 

 look remarkably well, and all vegetation flourishes, even 



