THE DUCKS. 213 



are one thing in the summer, but quite another in the winter. 

 To most they are only known when the land swarms with 

 tourists, when every shooting lodge is occupied to over- 

 flowing from kitchen to garret, and gay picnic parties hold 

 high frolic in each glen far and near. At that time the 

 country is knee-deep in purple heather, the guns of the 

 shooters are echoed on every side, and the grouse, doubtless 

 cursing the inundation of sportsmen with modern fashions, 

 long once more for the comparative peace enjoyed by their 

 primogenitor, who had nothing to fear but his natural foes 

 the hawks and the flintlocks of the highland chief's foresters. 

 Every brook and tarn in June is threshed by lines of 

 enthusiastic fishers; the post comes twice a day; smart 

 equipages imported from the Lowlands dash about the 

 country roads; and Scotland then is popular, wealthy, 

 and overrun. Nearly all in these days of cheap tours know 

 this phase of the matter, but when the first frost takes the 

 colour out of the heather-bells, and the rowan-berries are at 

 their brightest scarlet, a great change comes upon the face 

 of the land. At the first pelting hailstorm from the north- 

 ward darkening the faces of the lochs and filling the higher 

 mountain gulleys with whiteness, the fine-weather invaders 

 take the hint, the lodges are deserted, peers and commoners 

 flit southward, Government itself makes note of the altered 

 circumstances, and posts are reduced to one per day or less, 

 hotels close their hospitable doors, and all the land sinks 

 into repose, the scattered permanent inhabitants and many- 

 ancestored lairds, with patriotism enough to stick by their 

 acres all the year round, waking one day to find themselves 

 alone and winter palpably upon them. 



Such, but briefer, as befitted the coldness of my position 

 before the window-panes, were my meditations while con- 

 templating a wide stretch of snowy hills on the first morning 

 of a midwinter visit to an old Scotch mansion, a visit to be 

 varied by some rough sport and skating if the frost held. 



However, it won't do to keep breakfast waiting any 



