THE MOLE-CATCHER. 291 



no means so free as his many admirers seem to suppose. Even a 

 collie is always prepared to bark, and oftentimes to bite on very 

 little provocation, or no provocation at all. The fox-bunter's 

 terrier, wbetber be is pure or a nondescript cross, very rarely 

 indeed barks at a stranger, and never under any circumstances 

 offers to bite. We question if there is a human being to-day in 

 life who can honestly assert that he has ever been bitten by a 

 fox-hunter's dog. With Macdonald we had a long and interesting 

 crack, in the course of which we touched on some matters of 

 sufficient importance to be introduced to the reader on a future 

 occasion. 



We had also a visit some little time ago from Sandy Macarthur, 

 a well-known mole-catcher in Lochaber and the neighbouring 

 districts ; a very intelligent and civU man, whose only fault is that 

 when you have collared him there is no spontaneity in his crack. 

 Even when you have got firm hold enough of him, you have to 

 extract his frequently very valuable information from him by a 

 process akin to that which an ingenious and learned counsel 

 employs in the case of a recalcitrant and unwOling witness at an 

 important jury trial. Sandy, however, is a good fellow all the 

 same, slow but sure ; and his quiet imobtrusiveness and reticence 

 is perhaps to be attributed to the exigencies of his profession ; a 

 " rattling, roaring Willie " of a mole-catcher, with, to use a Gaelic 

 phrase, his tongue constantly on his shoulder, would probably 

 prove but an unsuccessful hunter of the velvet-coated quick-eared, 

 and timid subterranean family of the Mac Talpa. Sandy, on the 

 contrary, goes to work in dead silence and a-tiptoe, and bags his 

 mole as quietly as an angler baskets his trout from out the glassy 

 pool, over which, if but his shadow moved, he would angle long 

 in vain. Sandy assures us that moles are to be found this season 

 where they were never seen before, and where he was at first a 

 good deal puzzled to account for their appearance. On a full 



