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. ]Vot 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 om’ 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 1 843, and remained from the month of June 
till Eeb. 1844, between Trondjeim (Drontheim), and Bosicop on the Alten Fiord. An 
account of this tour written on the spot by Mr. Matthew's, and entitled “ Rough 
Notes of a Larh among the Mountains and Fiords of the North,” appeared in the 
NortJiem Whig, a Belfast newspaper, in a series of letters addressed to his fi’iend. 
