1 88 NETHER LOCHABER. 



the good city of Inverness has of recent years become so famous. 

 Such a trophy of the chase, complete in all its parts, would have 

 deserved the place of honour amid a thousand such trophies in the 

 noblest hall in the kingdom. As we handled these antlers, and 

 poised them at arm's length with admiration, the thought suddenly 

 struck us that Edmund Waller, the poet, must have had some such 

 magnificent trophy before him when he burst into the following 

 apostrophe, in which a well-known fact in the natural history of 

 the animal is so happily interwoven with the old mythological 

 legend : 



" O fertile head ! which every year 

 Could such a crop of wonder bear ! 

 The teeming earth did never bring 

 So soon so hard, so huge a thing : 

 Which, might it never have been cast, 

 Each year's growth added to the last, 

 These lofty branches had supplied, 

 The earth's bold sons' prodigious pride ; 

 Heaven with these engines had been scal'd 

 When mountains heaped on mountains failed." 



Lines, by the way, that would form a most happy and appropriate 

 inscription for any really fine trophy of this kind. 



Calling upon the Misses Macdonald of Achtriachtan the other 

 day at Fort-William, we were shown some very fine old silver-plate, 

 having a history of its own, to the recital of which we listened with 

 no small interest. After the battle of Culloden, a party of " red- 

 coat " soldiers entered Lochaber, and employed themselves in 

 pillaging and plundering in all directions. Hearing that visitors so 

 unwelcome were in the neighbourhood, Mrs. Cameron of Glenevis, 

 a lady of great spirit and decision of character, had all her silver- 

 plate, china, and other valuables buried deep in the ground outside 

 the garden wall, after which she removed, with her children and 

 personal attendants, to a spacious cave called Uaimh Shomhairle 

 (Samuel's Cave), far up the glen, in the south-western shoulder of 



