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above him a six-feet-deep load of earth-to say nothing of the improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside. Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at three jumps-the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and about fifteen without, and landed us, with a squash, in a cabbage-garden inclosed on the other three sides by a house and a holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude, thrust out a long

swore to blow out our brains if we did not in-
stantly surrender ourselves, and deliver up the
corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name,
which he knew as well as his own.
He was
deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his
patterero till we had laid down the corpse. He
swore that he saw the sack in the moonlight.
This was a horse-cloth with which we had in-
tended to saddle the "cowte," and that had re-
mained, during the supernatural agency under
which we laboured, clutched unconsciously
and convulsively in our grasp. Long was it
ere Davie Donald would see us in our true
light-but at length he drew on his Kilmar-
nock nightcap, and, coming out with a bouet,
let us through the trance and out of the front
door, thoroughly convinced, till we read Be-
wick, that old Southfield was not dead, although
in a very bad way indeed. Let this be a lesson
to schoolboys not to neglect the science of na-
tural history, and to study the character of the
White Owl.

"small birds rejoicing in spring's leafy bow-| half stifled, and little likely to heave up from ers," fast-locked we were going to say in each other's arms, but sitting side by side in the same cozey nuptial nest, to be startled out of their love-dreams by the great lamp-eyed, beaked face of a horrible monster with horns, picked out of feathered bed, and wafted off in one bunch, within talons, to pacify a set of hissing, and snappish, and shapeless powderpuffs, in the loophole of a barn? In a house where a cat is kept, mice are much to be pitied. They are so infatuated with the smell of a respectable larder, that to leave the premises, they confess, is impossible. Yet every hour-duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and nay, every minute of their lives-must they be in the fear of being leaped out upon by four velvet paws, and devoured with kisses from a whiskered mouth, and a throat full of that incomprehensible music-a purr. Life, on such terms, seems to us any thing but desirable. But the truth is, that mice in the fields are not a whit better off. Owls are cats with wings. Skimming along the grass tops, they stop in a momentary hover, let drop a talon, and away with Mus, his wife, and small family of blind children. It is the white, or yellow, or barn, or church, or Screech-Owl, or Gilley-Howlet, that behaves in this way; and he makes no bones of a mouse, uniformly swallowing him alive. Our friend, we suspect, though no drunkard, is somewhat of a glutton. In one thing we agree with him, that there is no sort of harm in a heavy supper. There, however, we are guilty of some confusion of ideas; for what to us, who rise in the morning, seems a supper, is to him who gets up at evening twilight, a breakfast. We therefore agree with him in thinkOwis-both White and common Brown, are ing that there is no sort of harm in a heavy not only useful in a mountainous country, but breakfast. After having passed a pleasant highly ornamental. How serenely beautiful night in eating and flirting, he goes to bed be- their noiseless flight; a flake of snow is not times, about four o'clock in the morning; and, winnowed through the air more softly-silent! as Bewick observes, makes a blowing, hissing Gliding along the dark shadows of a wood, noise, resembling the snoring of a man. In-how spiritual the motion-how like the thought deed, nothing can be more diverting to a person annoyed by blue devils, than to look at a White Owl and his wife asleep. With their heads gently inclined towards each other, there they keep snoring away like any Christian couple. Should the one make a pause, the other that instant awakes, and, fearing something may be wrong with his spouse, opens a pair of glimmering winking eyes, and inspects the adjacent physiognomy with the scrutinizing stare of a village apothecary. If all be right, the concert is resumed, the snore sometimes degenerating into a snort of snivel, and the snivel into a blowing hiss. First time we heard this noise was in a churchyard when we were mere boys, having ventured in after dark to catch the minister's colt for a gallop over to the parish-capital, where there was a dancingschool ball. There had been a nest of Owls in some hole in the spire; but we never doubted for a moment that the noise of snoring, blowing, hissing, and snapping proceeded from a testy old gentleman that had been buried that forenoon, and had come alive again a day after the fair. Had we reasoned the matter a little, we must soon have convinced ourselves that there was no ground for alarm to us at least, for the noise was like that of some one

of a dream! And then, during the hushed midnight hours, how jocund the whoop and hollo from the heart of sycamore-gray rock, or ivyed Tower! How the Owls of Windermere must laugh at the silly Lakers, that under the garish eye of day, enveloped in clouds of dust, whirl along in rattling post-shays in pur suit of the picturesque! Why, the least ima ginative Owl that ever hunted mice by moonlight on the banks of Windermere, must know the character of its scenery better than any poetaster that ever dined on char at Bowness or Lowood. The long quivering lines of light illumining some silvan isle-the evening-star shining from the water to its counterpart in the sky-the glorious phenomenon of the double moon-the night-colours of the woods—and, once in the three years perhaps, that loveliest and most lustrous of celestial forms, the lunar rainbow-all these and many more beauteous and magnificent sights are familiar to the Owls of Windermere. And who know half so well as they do the echoes of Furness, and Applethwaite, and Loughrigg, and Langdale, all the way on to Dungeon-Gill and Pavey-Ark, Scawfell and the Great Gable, and that sea of mountains, of which every wave has a name? Midnight-when asleep so still and silent-seems

inspired with the joyous spirit of the Owls in tral table in the Palace of Stuffed Birds, you their revelry-and answers to their mirth and may admire his outward very self-the semmerriment through all her clouds. The Mop-blance of the Owl he was when he used to eye ing Owl, indeed!-the Boding Owl, forsooth! the moon shining over the Northern Sea:-the Melancholy Owl, you blockhead!—why, but if you would see the noblẻ and beautiful they are the most cheerful-joy-portending- Creature himself, in all his living glory, you and exulting of God's creatures! Their flow must seek him through the long summer twiof animal spirits is incessant-crowing-cocks light among the Orkney or the Shetland Isles. are a joke to them-blue devils are to them The Snowy Owl dearly loves the snow-and unknown-not one hypochondriac in a thou- there is, we believe, a tradition among them, sand barns-and the Man-in-the-Moon acknow- that their first ancestor and ancestress rose up ledges that he never heard one of them utter a together from a melting snow-wreath on the complaint. very last day of a Greenland winter, when all at once the bright fields re-appear. The race still inhabits that frozen coast-being common, indeed, through all the regions of the Arctic Circle. It is numerous on the shores of Hudson's Bay, in Norway, Sweden, and Lapland-but in the temperate parts of Europe and America, "rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."

in their present advanced state of civilization, contain !-we defy, we say, all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe to construct such a surtout as that of the Snowy Owl, covering him, with equal luxury and comfort, in summer's heat and winter's cold. The elements, in all their freezing fury, cannot reach the body of the bird through that beautiful down-mail. Well guarded are the openings of those great eyes. Neither the driving dust, nor the searching sleet, nor the sharp frozen snow-stoure, give him the ophthalmia. Gutta Serena is to him unknown-no snowy Owl was ever couched for cataract-no need has he for an oculist, should he live an hundred years; and were they to attempt any operation on his lens or iris, how he would hoot at Alexander and Wardrope!

But what say ye to an Owl, not only like an eagle in plumage, but equal to the largest eagle in size-and therefore named, from the King of Birds, the EAGLE OWL. Mr. Selby! you have done justice to the monarch of the Bubos. We hold ourselves to be persons of tolerable courage, as the world goes-but we could not answer for ourselves showing fight with such a customer, were he to waylay us by night in We defy all the tailors on the face of the a wood. In comparison, Jack Thurtell looked habitable globe; and what countless crossharmless. No-that bold, bright-eyed mur-legged fractional parts of men-who, like the derer, with Horns on his head like those on beings of whom they are constituents, are Michael Angelo's statue of Moses, would never thought to double their numbers every thirty have had the cruel cowardice to cut the wea-years-must not the four quarters of the earth, sand, and smash out the brains of such a miserable wretch as Weare! True he is fond of blood-and where's the harm in that? It is his nature. But if there be any truth in the science of Physiognomy-and be that of Phrenology what it will, most assuredly there is truth in it—the original of that Owl, for whose portrait the world is indebted to Mr. Selby, and Sir Thomas Lawrence never painted a finer one of Prince or Potentate of any Holy or Unholy Alliance, must have despised Probert from the very bottom of his heart. No prudent Eagle but would be exceedingly desirous of keeping on good terms with him-devilish shy, i' faith, of giving him any offence by the least hauteur of manner, or the slightest violation of etiquette. An Owl of this character and calibre, is not afraid to show his horns at mid-day on the mountain. The Fox is not over and above fond of him-and his claws can kill a cub at a blow. The Doe sees the monster sitting on the back of her fawn, and maternal instinct overcome by horror, bounds into the brake, and leaves the pretty creature to its fate. Thank Heaven, he is, in Great Britain, a rare bird! Tempest-driven across the Northern Ocean from his native forests in Russia, an occasional visitant he "frightens this Isle from its propriety," and causes a hideous screaming through every wood he haunts. Some years ago, one was killed on the upland moors in the county of Durham-and, of course, paid a visit to Mr. Bullock's Museum. Eagle-like in all its habits, it builds its nest on high rocks-sometimes on the loftiest treesand seldom lays more than two eggs. One is one more than enough-and we who fly by night trust never to fall in with a live specimen of the Strix-Bubo of Linnæus.

But largest and loveliest of all the silent night-gliders-the SNOWY OWL! Gentle reader -if you long to see his picture, we have told you where it may be found;—and in the College Museum, within a glass vase on the cen

Night, doubtless, is the usual season of his prey; but he does not shun the day, and is sometimes seen hovering unhurt in the sunshine. The red or black grouse flies as if pursued by a ghost; but the Snowy Owl, little slower than the eagle, in dreadful silence overtakes his flight, and then death is sudden and sure. Hawking is, or was, a noble pastime― and we have now prevented our eyes from glancing at Jer-falcon, Peregrine, or Goshawk• but Owling, we do not doubt, would be noways inferior sport; and were it to become prevalent in modern times, as Hawking was in times of old, why, each lady, as Venus already fair, with an Owl on her wrist, would look as wise as Minerva.

But our soul sickens at all those dreams of blood! and fain would turn away from fierce eye, cruel beak, and tearing talon-war-weapons of them that delight in wounds and death -to the contemplation of creatures whose characteristics are the love of solitude-shy gentleness of manner-the tender devotion of mutual attachment-and, in field or forest, a lifelong passion for peace.

FOURTH CANTICLE.

WELCOME then the RING-DOVE-the QUEST or CUSHAT, for that is the very bird we have had in our imagination. There is his fulllength portrait, stealthily sketched as the Solitary was sitting on a tree. You must catch him napping, indeed, before he will allow you an opportunity of colouring him on the spot from nature. It is not that he is more jealous or suspicious of man's approach than other bird; for never shall we suffer ourselves to believe that any tribe of the descendants of the Dove that brought to the Ark the olive tidings of re-appearing earth, can in their hearts hate or fear the race of the children of man. But Nature has made the Cushat a lover of the still forest-gloom; and therefore, when his lonesome haunts are disturbed or intruded on, he flies to some yet profounder, some more central solitude, and folds his wing in the hermitage of a Yew, sown in the time of the ancient Britons.

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of eight and nine ante-meridian. Happily, however, for our future peace of mind, and not improbably for the whole conformation of our character, our Guardian Genius-(every boy has one constantly at his side, both during school and play hours, though it must be confessed sometimes a little remiss in his duty, for the nature even of angelical beings is imperfect)—always so contrived it, that with all our cunning we never could kill a Cushat. Many a long hour-indeed whole Saturdays— have we lain perdue among broom and whins, the beautiful green and yellow skirting of sweet Scotia's woods, watching his egress or ingress, our gun ready cocked, and finger on trigger, that on the flapping of his wings not a moment might be lost in bringing him to the ground. But couch where we might, no Cushat ever came near our insidious lair. Now and then a Magpie-birds who, by the by, when they suspect you of any intention of shooting them, are as distant in their manners Cushats themselves, otherwise as impudent as Cockneys-would come, hopping in conIt is the Stock-Dove, we believe, not the tinual tail-jerks, with his really beautiful plumRing-Dove, from whom are descended all the age, if one could bring one's-self to think it so, varieties of the races of Doves. What tenderer and then sport the pensive within twenty praise can we give them all, than that the yards of the muzzle of Brown-Bess, impatient to Dove is the emblem of Innocence, and that the let fly. But our soul burned, our heart panted name of innocence-not of frailty-is Woman? for a Cushat; and in that strong fever-fit of When Hamlet said the reverse, he was think- passion, could we seek to slake our thirst for ing, you know, of the Queen-not of Ophelia. that wild blood with the murder of a thievish Is not woman by nature chaste as the Dove- eavesdropper of a Pye? The Blackbird, too, as the Dove faithful? Sitting all alone with often dropt out of the thicket into an open her babe in her bosom, is she not as a Dove glade in the hazel-shaws, and the distinctness devoted to her own nest? Murmureth she not of his yellow bill showed he was far within a pleasant welcome to her wearied home-re- shot-range. Yet, let us do ourselves justice, turned husband, even like the Dove among the we never in all our born days dreamt of shootwoodlands when her mate re-alights on the ing a Blackbird-him that scares away sadpine? Should her spouse be taken from her ness from the woodland twilight gloom, at and disappear, doth not her heart sometimes morn or eve; whose anthem, even in those break, as they say it happens to the Dove? dim days when Nature herself it might be well But oftener far, findeth not the widow that her thought were melancholy, forceth the firmaorphans are still fed by her own hand, that is ment to ring with joy. Once "the snow-white filled with good things by Providence; till cony sought its evening meal," unconscious grown up, and able to shift for themselves, of our dangerous vicinity, issuing with erected away they go-just as the poor Dove lamentethears from the wood edge. That last was, we for her mate in the snare of the fowler, yet confess, such a temptation to touch the trigger, feedeth her young continually through the whole day, till away too go they-alas, in neither case, perhaps, ever more to return!

We dislike all favouritism, all foolish and capricious partiality for particular bird or beast; but dear, old, sacred associations, will tell upon all one thinks or feels towards any place or person in this world of ours, near or remote. God forbid we should criticise the Cushat! We desire to speak of him as tenderly as of a friend buried in our early youth. Too true it is, that often and oft, when schoolboys, have we striven to steal upon him in his solitude, and to shoot him to death. In morals, and in religion, it would be heterodox to deny that the will is as the deed. Yet in cases of high and low-way robbery and murder, there Joes seem, treating the subject not in philosophical but popular style, to be some little difference between the two; at least we hope so, for otherwise we can with difficulty imagine ne person not deserving to be ordered for execution, on Wednesday next, between the hours

that had we resisted it we must have been either more or less than boy. We fired; and kicking up his heels, doubtless in fright, but as it then seemed to us, during our disappointment, much rather in frolic-nay, absolute derision-away bounced Master Rabbit to his burrow, without one particle of soft silvery wool on sward or bush, to bear witness to our unerring aim. As if the branch on which he had been sitting were broken, away then went the crashing Cushat through the intermingling sprays. The free flapping of his wings was soon heard in the air above the tree-tops, and ere we could recover from our almost bitter amazement, the creature was murmuring to his mate on her shallow nest-a far-off murmur, solitary and profound-to reach unto which, through the tangled mazes of the forest would have required a separate sense, instinct, or faculty, which we did not possess. So, skulking out of our hiding-place, we made no comment on the remark of a homeward-plodding labourer, who had heard the report, and

now smelt the powder-" Cushats are gayan' | all well knowing that their fresh meal on the kittle birds to kill"—but returned, with our tender herbage will not be broken in upon beshooting-bag as empty as our stomach, to the fore the dews of next morning, ushering in a Manse. new day to them of toil or travel.

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Why do the birds sing on Sunday?" said once a little boy to us-and we answered him in a lyrical ballad, which we have lost. But although the birds certainly do sing on Sunday -behaviour that with our small gentle Calvinist, who dearly loved them, caused some doubts of their being so innocent as during the weekdays they appeared to be-we cannot set down their fault to the score of ignorance. Is it in the holy superstition of the world-wearied heart that man believes the inferior creatures to be conscious of the calm of the Sabbath, and that they know it to be the day of our rest? Or is it that we transfer the feeling of our inward calm to all the goings-on of Nature, and thus imbue them with a character of reposing sanctity, existing only in our own spirits? Both solutions are true. The instincts of those creatures we know only in their symptoms and their effects, in the wonderful range of action over which they reign. Of the instincts themselves-as feelings or ideas-we know not any thing, nor ever can know; for an impassable gulf separates the nature of those that may be to perish, from ours that are to live for ever. But their power of memory, we must believe is not only capable of minutest retention, but also stretches back to afar-and some power or other they do possess, that gathers up the past experience into rules of conduct that guide them in their solitary or gregarious life. Why, therefore, should not the birds of Scotland know the Sabbath-day? On that day the Water-Ouzel is never disturbed by angler among the murmurs of his own water-fall; and as he flits down the banks and braes of the burn, he sees no motion, he hears no sound about the cottage that is the boundary of his furthest flight-for "the dizzying mill-wheel rests." The merry-nodding rooks, that in spring-time keep following the very heels of the ploughman-may they not know it to be Sabbath, when all the horses are standing idle in the field, or taking a gallop by themselves round the head-rigg? Quick of hearing are birds-one and all-and in every action of their lives are obedient to sounds. May they not, then-do they not connect a feeling of perfect safety with the tinkle of the small kirkbell? The very jay himself is not shy of people on their way to worship. The magpie, that never sits more than a minute at a time in the same place on a Saturday, will on the Sabbath remain on the kirkyard wall with all the composure of a dove. The whole feathered creation know our hours of sleep. They awake before us; and ere the earliest labourer has said his prayers, have not the woods and valleys been ringing with their hymns? Why, therefore, may not they, who know, each weekday, the hour of our lying down and our rising up, know also the day of our general rest? The animals whose lot is labour, shall they not know it? Yes; the horse on that day sleeps in shade or sunshine without fear of being disturbed-his neck forgets the galling collar, "and there are forty feeding like one,"

So much for our belief in the knowledge, instinctive or from a sort of reason, possessed, by the creatures of the inferior creation, of the heaven-appointed Sabbath to man and beast. But it is also true that we transfer our inward feelings to their outward condition, and with our religious spirit imbue all the ongoings of animated and even inanimated life. There is always a shade of melancholy, a tinge of pensiveness, a touch of pathos, in all profound rest. Perhaps because it is so much in contrast with the turmoil of our ordinary being. Perhaps because the soul, when undisturbed, will, from the impulse of its own divine nature, have high, solemn, and awful thoughts. In such state it transmutes all things into a show of sympathy with itself. The church-spire, rising high above the smoke and stir of a town, when struck by the sun-fire, seems, on market-day, a tall building in the air, that may serve as a guide to people from a distance flocking into bazaars. The same church-spire, were its loud-tongued bell to call from aloft on the gathering multitude below, to celebrate the anniversary of some great victory, Waterloo or Trafalgar, would appear to stretch up its stature triumphantly into the sky-so much the more triumphantly, if the standard of England were floating from its upper battlements. But to the devout eye of faith, doth it not seem to express its own character, when on the Sabbath it performs no other office than to point to heaven?

So much for the second solution. But independently of both, no wonder that all na ture seems to rest on the Sabbath; for it doth rest-all of it, at least, that appertains to man and his condition. If the Fourth Commandment be kept-at rest is all the householdand all the fields round it are at rest. Calm flows the current of human life, on that gracious day, throughout all the glens and valleys of Scotland, as a stream that wimples in the morning sunshine, freshened but not flooded with the soft-falling rain of a summer-night. The spiral smoke-wreath above the cottage is not calmer than the motion within. True, that the wood-warblers do not cease their songs; but the louder they sing, the deeper is the stillness. And what perfect blessedness, when it is only joy that is astir in rest!

Loud-flapping Cushat! it was thou that inspiredst these solemn fancies; and we have only to wish thee, for thy part contributed to our Recreations, now that the acorns of autumn must be wellnigh consumed, many a plentiful repast, amid the multitude of thy now congregated comrades in the cleared stubble landsas severe weather advances, and the ground becomes covered with snow, regales undisturbed by fowler, on the tops of turnip, rape, and other cruciform plants, which all of thy race affect so passionately—and soft blow the sea-breezes on thy unruffled plumage, when thou takest thy winter's walk with kindred myriads on the shelly shore, and for a season minglest with gull and seamew-apart every

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tribe, one from the other, in the province of its | bodies--the chamber where the spirit breathed own peculiar instinct-yet all mysteriously its final farewell-the spot of its transitory love taught to feed or sleep together within the roar or margin of the main.

Sole-sitting Cushat! We see thee through the yew-tree's shade, on some day of the olden time, but when or where we remember notfor what has place or time to do with the vision of a dream? That we see thee is all we know, and that serenely beautiful thou art! Most pleasant is it to dream, and to know we dream! By sweet volition we keep ourselves half asleep and half awake; and all our visions of thought, as they go swimming along, partake at once of reality and imagination. Fiction and truth-clouds, shadows, phantoms and phantasms—ether, sunshine, substantial forms and sounds that have a being, blending together in a scene created by us, and partly impressed upon us, and which one motion of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive delight! In some such dreaming state of mind are we now; and, gentle reader, if thou art awake, lay aside the visionary volume, or read a little longer, and likely enough | is it that thou too mayest fall half asleep. If so, let thy drowsy eyes still pursue the glimmering paragraphs-and wafted away wilt thou feel thyself to be into the heart of a Highland forest, that knows no bounds but those of the uncertain sky.

Away from our remembrance fades the noisy world of men into a silent glimmer-and now it is all no more than a mere faint thought. On-on-on! through briery brake-matted thicket-grassy glade-On-on-on! further into the Forest! What a confusion of huge stones, rocks, knolls, all tumbled together into a chaos-not without its stern and sterile beauty! Still are there, above, blue glimpses of the sky-deep though the umbrage be, and wide-flung the arms of the oaks, and of pines in their native wilderness gigantic as oaks, and extending as broad a shadow. Now the firmament has vanished-and all is twilight. Immense stems, "in number without number numberless,"-bewildering eye and soul-all still-silent-steadfast-and so would they be in a storm. For what storm-let it range aloft as it might, till the surface of the forest toss and roar like the sea-could force its path through these many million trunks? The thunder-stone might split that giant therehow vast! how magnificent!-but the brother by his side would not tremble; and the sound -in the awful width of the silence-what more would it be than that of the woodpecker alarming the insects of one particular tree!

Poor wretch that we are!-to us the uncompanioned silence of the solitude hath become terrible. More dreadful is it than the silence of the tomb; for there, often arise responses to the unuttered soliloquies of the pensive heart. But this is as the silence, not of Time, but of Eternity. No burial heaps-no mounds-no cairns! It is not as if man had perished here, and been forgotten; but as if this were a world in which there had been neither living nor dying. Too utter is the solitariness even for the ghosts of the dead! For they are thought to haunt the burial-places of what once was their

and delight, or of its sin and sorrow-to gaze with troubled tenderness on the eyes that once they worshipped-with cold ear to drink the music of the voices long ago adored; and in all their permitted visitations, to express, if but by the beckoning of the shadow of a hand, some unextinguishable longing after the converse of the upper world, even within the gates of the grave.

A change comes over us. Deep and still as is the solitude, we are relieved of our awe, and out of the forest-gloom arise images of beauty that come and go, gliding as on wings, or statue-like, stand in the glades, like the sylvan deities to whom of old belonged, by birthright, all the regions of the woods. On-on-on! further into the Forest!-and let the awe of imagination be still further tempered by the delight breathed even from any one of the lovely names sweet-sounding through the famous fables of antiquity. Dryad, Hamadryad! Faunus! Sylvanus!-Now, alas! ye are but names, and no more! Great Pan himself is dead, or here he would set up his reign But what right has such a dreamer to dream of the dethroned deities of Greece? The language they spoke is not his language; yet the words of the great poets who sang of gods and demigods, are beautiful in their silent meanings as they meet his adoring eyes; and, mighty Lyrists! has he not often floated down the templecrowned and altar-shaded rivers of your great Choral Odes?

On-on-on-further into the Forest!unless, indeed, thou dreadest that the limbs that bear on thy fleshly tabernacle may fail, and the body, left to itself, sink down and die. Ha! such fears thou laughest to scorn; for from youth upwards thou hast dallied with the wild and perilous: and what but the chill delight in which thou hast so often shivered in threatening solitude brought thee here! These dens are not dungeons, nor are we a thrall. Yet if dungeons they must be called—and they are deep, and dark, and grim-ten thousand gates hath this great prison-house, and wide open are they all. So on-on-on !-further into the Forest! But who shall ascend to its summit? Eagles and dreams. Round its base we go, rejoicing in the new-found day, and once more cheered and charmed with the music of birds. Say whence came, ye scientific world-makers, these vast blocks of granite? Was it fire or water, think ye, that hung in the air the semblance of yon Gothic cathedral, without nave, or chancel, or aisle-a mass of solid rock? Yet it looks like the abode of Echoes; and haply when there is thunder, rolls out its lengthening shadow of sound to the ear of the solitary shepherd afar off on Cairngorm.

On-on-on!-further into the Forest! Now on all sides leagues of ancient trees surround us, and we are safe as in the grave from the persecuting love or hatred of friends or foes. The sun shall not find us by day, nor the moon by night. Were our life forfeited to what are called the laws, how could the laws discover the criminal? How could they drag us from

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