CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET 



Hurra! — Heron — hurra! why, that was an awkward 

 tumble — and very nearly had we hold of thee by the 

 tail ! Didst thou take us for a water-kelpie ? A fright 

 like that is enough to leave thee an idiot all the rest 

 of thy life. 'T is a wonder thou didst not go into fits — 

 but thy nerves must be sorely shaken — and what an 

 account of this adventure will certainly be shrieked 

 unto thy mate, to the music of the creaking boughs! 

 Not, even wert thou a secular bird of ages, wouldst 

 thou ever once again revisit this dreadful place. For 

 fear has a wondrous memory in all dumb creatures — 

 and rather wouldst thou see thy nest die of famine, 

 than seek for fish in this man-monster-haunted pool! 

 Farewell ! farewell ! 



Many are the hundreds of hill and mountain lochs 

 to us as familiarly known, round all their rushy or 

 rocky margins, as that pond there in the garden of 

 Buchanan Lodge. That pond has but one goose and 

 one gander, and nine goslings — about half-a-dozen 

 trouts, if indeed they have not sickened and died of 

 Nostalgia, missing in the stillness the gurgle of their 

 native Tweed — and a brace of perch, now nothing 

 but prickle. But the lochs — the hill, the mountain 

 lochs now in our mind's eye and our mind's ear, — 

 heaven and earth ! the bogs are black with duck, teal, 

 and widgeon — up there "comes for food or play" to 

 the holla of the winds, a wedge of wild geese, piercing 

 [68] 



