DEER-STALKING. 



4-7 



companion ; thus laying the foundation for the crime with which the poor girl was 

 charged. The costumes of the figures are French or Belgian. Other animals besides 

 the cow are introduced into the picture-a calf and goats. The work is distinguished 

 throughout by the clean touch and effective handling of the painter. It has been 

 admirably engraved by Mr. S. Cousins. 



In the room of the Academy devoted to water-colour pictures, there was, that year, 

 a fine drawing entitled " Deer-Stalking." The subject was little more than a different 

 version of a theme the artist had previously shown on more than one occasion ; all of 

 which must vividly remind those who have read Professor Wilson's "Recreations 

 of Christopher North" of his poetic and graphic description of this Highland sport :— 



"Dogs ! Down— down— down— be stonelike, O Shelty !— and Hamish, sink thou into the 

 heather like a lizard ; for if these old dim eyes of ours may be in aught believed, yonder by the 

 birches stands a Red Deer snuffing the east wind ! Hush ! hush ! hush ! He suspects an 

 enemy in that airt,* but death comes upon him with stealthy foot from the west ; and if Apollo 

 and Diana — the divinities we so long have worshipped — be now propitious, his antlers shall be 

 entangled in the heather, and his hoofs beat the heavens. Hamish, the rifle ! A tinkle as of 

 iron, and a hiss accompanying the explosion, and the King of the Wilderness, bounding up 

 into the air with his antlers higher than ever waved chieftain's plume, falls down stone-dead 

 where he stood lightning itself could hardly have withered him into more instan- 

 taneous cessation of life ! 



" He is an enormous animal. What antlers ! Roll him over, Hamish, on his side ! See, up 

 to our breast, nearly, reaches the topmost branch. He is what the hunter of old would call a 

 ' Stag of Ten.' His eye has lost the flash of freedom — the tongue that browsed the brush- 

 wood is bitten through by the clenched teeth — the fleetness of his feet has felt that fatal frost 



the wild heart is hushed, Hamish — tame, tame, tame ; and there the Monarch of the Mountains, 

 the King of the Cliffs, the Grand Llama of the Glens, the Sultan of the Solitudes, the Dey of 

 the Deserts, the Royal Ranger of the Woods and Forests — yea, the very Prince of the Air 

 and Thane of Thunder, ' shorn of all his beams,' lies motionless as a dead Jackass by the 

 wayside, whose hide was not thought worth the trouble of flaying by its owner the gypsies ! 

 * To this complexion has he come at last,' he who at dawn had borrowed the wings of the 

 wind to carry him across the cataracts ! 



" A sudden pang shoots across our heart. What right had we to commit this murder ? How 

 henceforth, shall we dare to lift up our heads among the lovers of liberty, after having thus stolen 

 basely from behind on him, the boldest, brightest, and most beautiful of all her sons ! We 

 who for so many years have been just able to hobble, and no more, by the aid of the Crutch, 

 who feared to let the heather-bent touch our toe, so sensitive in its gout — we, the old and 

 impotent, all last winter bed-ridden, and even now seated like a lameterf on a shelty, J strapped 

 by a patent buckle to a saddle provided with a pummel behind as well as before — such an 

 unwieldy and weary wretch as We — fat and scant of breath — and with our hand almost per- 

 petually pressed against our left side, when a coughing-fit of asthma brings back the stitch, 

 seldom an absentee — to assassinate that Red Deer, whose flight on earth could accompany the 



* Direction, or point of the compass. + Cripple. 



X Shetland pony. 



