THE RED GROUSE. 55 



an alpine torrent environed by mountains of wholly different aspect, 

 though rising more or less precipitously, on the three sides ; the 

 fourth side being the defile from which we had just emerged. 

 Being a little in the rear I could not but pause to view the whole 

 group, when my friends and their shaggy steeds had joined the 

 others. Not only did the ponies and dogs all differ from each 

 other, but no two men of the party were similarly attired : — no 

 graceless" round hat," as objectionable to the eye of the painter as 

 to that of the native of the east, disfigured the scene. The entire 

 group, in their various attitudes, amid the sporting paraphernalia, 

 and surrounded by such scenery, was greatly more picturesque 

 than any I ever beheld even on the canvas of a Landseer or a 

 Cooper, 



The effects of sunlight and shadow, storm and calm, are ever 

 imparting variety to such scenes. We are often, with a vast 

 extent of country in view, quite alone amid the heathy moun- 

 tain solitude, from which the only movement suggestive of life 

 upon the earth is derived from the dark shadows of the clouds, 

 moving sometimes with slow and majestic, at others with hurried 

 pace over the distant range of mountains, and again pausing 

 for a time on the sunlit slopes, so as to deceive the eye by their 

 similitude to tracts of heather. Or we may, from a hill-top look 

 down upon a rainbow apparently lying in all its beauteous hues 

 upon the plain beneath, like a ray of the setting sun upon the 

 ocean, and suggesting a still more brilliant and airy " path of 

 rays" than even that immortalized by the poet. 



The following brief notes on different species of grouse, will perhaps interest some 

 readers, although they do not refer to the subject matter of the work. They were 

 communicated by my late friend George Matthews, Esq., J.P., D.L., of Springvale, 

 in the county of Down, whose observations on our native birds are often mentioned 

 in these pages. That gentleman, with three companions of congenial taste, made a 

 sporting tour to the coast of Norway in ] 843, and remained from the month of June 

 till Feb. 1844, between Trondjeim (Drontheim), and Bosicop on the Alten Fiord. An 

 account of this tour written on the spot by Mr. Matthews, and entitled " Rough 

 Notes of a Lark among the Mountains and Fiords of the North," appeared in the 

 Northern Whig, a Belfast newspaper, in a series of letters addressed to his friend, 



