TEE DUCKS. 215 



blessed with well-strung nerves and a healthy appreciation 

 of the beautiful ! A comfortable breakfast and a mild cigar 

 glowing with seductive warmth under the observer's nose 

 are important concomitants for due enjoyment of the scene ! 

 For my part, fresh from the tropics, in whose gorgeousness 

 familiarity has bred a certain distrust, a snowy landscape 

 and a frosty morning are full of quiet charms. The feet 

 make no noise upon the soft carpet of snow, which, as dry as 

 the sand of the desert, falls like dust from the shoes at every 

 step, and goes flying in minature siroccos across the open 

 plains of the lawns and carriage drives, piling itself up 

 against the trunks of trees and roots of shrubs, and scooping 

 hollows to leeward of them, just as the fresh northern air 

 drives it. The boughs of the evergreens are loaded down to 

 the ground with their white burdens, and if by chance a 

 blackbird, scared from his feast of yew- berries by approaching 

 figures, breaks away with a resounding chuckle, he causes a 

 whole avalanche of glittering crystals to fall from the shaken 

 boughs behind him. But in general everything is very 

 silent; the birds are too much occupied in searching for food 

 even to sing if they had a cause, and in the farmyards the 

 sheep and kine stand knee-deep in snow and straw, their 

 whole attention taken up with the fragrant hay being liberally 

 dealt out by that leather-legginged shepherd, who stops his 

 work for a moment to touch his cap as the master and his 

 guest pass. Truly the cold, white reign of winter is not with- 

 out a sweetness of its own ! 



A sharp spin of a couple of miles brought us in sight of 

 a boathouse nestling amongst birches at the head of a long 

 streak of pale water. The loch was shut in by high hills on 

 one side and stretches of flatter ground on the other, more 

 level only by comparison, for it was marsh and bog plenti- 

 fully supplied with deep peat holes and crevices broad enough 

 to swallow a Highland cow, like the giant in the fairy story, 

 "horns and all." Strange things are found in these steep- 

 sided cavities. I have myself rescued from one such trap 



