112 NETHER LOCHABER. 



be elected to a seat upon the bench of bishops, for he is ever careful 

 to fulfil the apostolic injunction to be the husband but of one wife ; 

 and until accident or old age deprives him of her, he is the model 

 and pattern of faithful and affectionate husbands, never violating 

 his conjugal vows, not even to the extent of the most innocent of 

 flirtations or the most Platonic of intimacies with a neighbouring 

 raveness, even though she should be younger, and sleeker, and 

 glossier than his own. The raven, in short, when he pairs, which 

 he does at the earliest moment permitted by the laws of ravendom, 

 pairs for life, and while his first choice is spared to him he wUl no 

 more think of paying court to another, be her charms what they 

 may, than he will of dying of hunger while there is a bone to pick, 

 a tender lamb, or braxied sheep within a circuit of a hundred miles 

 of his eyrie, in the most inaccessible cleft of yonder beetling pre- 

 cipice. We might now say something if we liked of the raven's 

 usefulness in the general economy as a hard-working and indefatig- 

 able inspector of nuisances, and how putrid animal matter of every 

 description disappears, as if by magic, wherever he is known and 

 appreciated; but this is a utilitarian age, and as we hate utilitarianism, 

 we are content merely to hint that the raven deserves special regard 

 as a sanitary reformer. "We prefer insisting on the fact that the 

 raven is a gentleman of very ancient descent, being able, in the 

 clearest manner, to trace his pedigree in unbroken line up to 

 the days of " Captain " Noah himself, as Byron irreverently styles 

 the patriarch. When any one in our day becomes distinguished 

 and attracts our special regard, we instantly set to work to trace 

 his descent, and although he himself can hardly tell who was his 

 grandfather, we are never satisfied until we have, by hook and by 

 crook, traced his ancestry to the Eagman Roll or the Norman 

 Conquest, and, having, thus ennobled him to our own entire satis- 

 faction, we cease not to pet and praise him until he is dead, and 

 then the newspapers swarm with obituary notices of the distinguished 



