26o NETHER LOCHABER. 



and that rough contact with the tines of the animal, whether 

 living or dead, was, in his younger days, avoided as one would 

 avoid the tooth of a rabid dog or a viper's fang. A stag antler's 

 wound, he avers, is dangerous at all times, hut most so in the end 

 of autumn — the rutting season — or, as he put it, " an ^m dhaibh 

 'bhi dol 'san damhair," when they take to their " wallowing pools." 

 Curiously enough, and by the merest accident, we have fallen in 

 with the following proverbial distich from an old volume on 

 Veneria, or Hunting of the Buclc, published in Loudon in 1622 : — 



" If thou art hurt by boar's tooth, the leech thy life may save ; 

 If thou art hurt by buck's horn, 'twill bring thee to thy grave. " 



So that the venom of a stag's horn wound seems to have been quite 

 as well known two hundred years ago as it is now ; better, indeed, 

 for those who followed the chase in the olden time were more 

 liable to such hurts than is possible in the case of the modern deer- 

 stalker, when the aid of dogs and the " gillie's " knife to give the 

 coup de grace to the " stag at bay," are matters of comparatively 

 little moment. It was a much more serious and risky aifair in the 

 days of the old " flint "-bearing musket. There was a paragraph 

 a short time ago about a serious attack by a stag on some men in 

 the island of Eaasay. It would be interesting to know whether 

 blood was drawn on the occasion, and if so, how the wounds have 

 healed. 



Hardly anything in our old Ossianie ballads, of which we have 

 such an interesting and ably edited collection in INIr. J. F. Campbell 

 of Islay's Leabhar-na-Feinne, is so curious as the great number of 

 dogs employed by the Fingalians in their huntings, — that is, if we 

 are to read the ballads with anything like literolness. Fifty, a 

 hundred, two hundred, and even five hundred dogs are spoken 

 about as freely as a modern sportsman speaks of couples. In one 

 ballad, for instance, recovered by ourselves, ten men, one of them 



