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could'st thou yet thou knowest we are all sinful in His eyes, and thou knowest on whose merits is the reliance of our hopes of Heaven. Thank you, Christian. Three minutes from two by your house-clock-she gives a clear warning-and three minutes from two by our watch--rather curious this coincidence to such a nicety-we must take up our Crutch and go. Thank thee, bonnie wee Christian-in wi' the bannocks intil our pouch-but we fear you must take us for a sad glutton.

"Zicketty, dicketty, dock,

The mouse ran up the clock;
The clock struck one,
Down the mouse ran,
Zicketty, dicketty, dock."

Come closer, Christian-and let us put it to
thine ear. What a pretty face of wonder at
the chime! Good people, you have work to
do in the hay-field-let us part-God bless
you-Good-by-farewell!

are the Children of the Mist, and perhaps they will favour us with a running commentary on Ossian. Stout, grim, heather-legged bodies they are, one and all, and luckily we are provided with snuff and tobacco sufficient for the whole crew. Were they even ghosts they will not refuse a sneeshin', and a Highland spirit will look picturesque puffing a cigar!-Hark! we know them and their vocation. These are the Genii of the Mountain-dew; and their hidden enginery, depend on't, is not far off, but buried in the bowels of some brae. See!-a faint mist dissipating itself over the heather! There--at work, shaming the idle waste, and in use and wont to break even the Sabbath-day, is a STILL!

Do we look like Excisemen? The Crutch has indeed a suspicious family resemblance to a gauging-rod; and literary characters, like us, may well be mistaken for the Supervisor himself. But the smuggler's eye knows his enemy at a glance, as the fox knows a hound; and the whispering group discern at once that we are of a nobler breed. That one fear dispelled, Highland hospitality bids us welcome, even into the mouth of the malt-kiln, and, with a smack on our loof, the Chief volunteers to initiate us into the grand mysteries of the Worm.

Half an hour since we parted-we cannot help being a little sad-and fear we were not so kind to the old people-not so considerate as we ought to have been-and perhaps though pleased with us just now, they may say to one another before evening that we were too merry for our years. Nonsense. We were all merry together-daft Uncle amang the lave-for The turf-door is flung outward on its lithe the creature came stealing in and sat down on hinges, and already what a gracious smell! his own stool in the corner; and what's the In we go, ushered by unbonneted Celts, genuse of wearing a long face at all times like a tlemen in manner wherever the kilt is worn! Methodist minister? A Methodist minister! for the tartan is the symbol of courtesy, and Why, John Wesley was facete, and Whit- Mac a good password all the world over befield humorous, and Rowland Hill witty-tween man and man. Lowland eyes are apt though he, we believe, was not a Methody; to water in the peat-reek, but erelong we shall yet were their hearts fountains of tears-and have another "drappie in our e'e," and drink ours is not a rock-if it be, 'tis the rock of Horeb.

Ha, Hamish! Here we are beneath the Merlin Crag. What sport? Why, five brace is not so much amiss-and they are thumpers. Fifteen brace in all. Ducks and flappers? Seven leash. We are getting on.

"But what are these,

So wither'd and so wild in their attire
That took not like th' inhabitants o' the earth,
And yet are on't? Live you or are you aught
That man may question. You seem to understand me,
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips :-you should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so!"

Shakspeare is not familiar, we find, among the natives of Loch-Etive side-else these figures would reply,

"All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glammis!" But not satisfied with laying their choppy fingers on their skinny lips, they now put them to their plooky noses, having first each dipped fore and thumb in his mull, and gibber Gaelic, to us unintelligible as the quacking of ducks, when a Christian auditor has been prevented from catching its meaning by the gobbling of turkeys.

Witches at the least, and about to prophesy to us some pleasant events, that are to terminate disastrously in after years. Is there no nook of earth perfectly solitary-but must natural or supernatural footsteps haunt the remotest and most central places? But now we shall have our fortunes told in choice Earse, for sure these

to the Clans in the "unchristened cretur." What a sad neglect in our education, among all the acquired lingoes extant, to have overlooked the Gaelic! Yet nobody who has ever heard P. R. preach an Earse Sermon, need despair of discoursing in that tongue after an hour's practice; so let us forget, if possible, every word of English, and the language now needed will rise up in its place.

And these figures in men's coats and women's petticoats are females? We are willing to believe it in spite of their beards. One of them absolutely suckling a child! Thank you, my dear sir, but we cannot swallow the contents of that quech. Yet, let us try.--A little too warm, and rather harsh; but meat and drink to a man of age. That seems to be goat-milk cheese, and the scones are barley; and they and the speerit will wash one another down in an amicable plea, nor quarrel at close quarters. Honey too-heather-honey of this blessed year's produce. Hecate's forefinger mixes it in a quech with mountain-dew-and that is Athole-brose?

There cannot be the least doubt in the world that the Hamiltonian system of teaching languages is one of the best ever invented. It will enable any pupil of common-run powers of atten tion to read any part of the New Testament in Greek in some twenty lessons of an hour each. But what is that to the principle of the worm? Half a blessed hour has not elapsed since we entered into the door of this hill-house, and we offer twenty to one that we read Ossian, ad

aperturam libri, in the original Gaelic. We feel | ycleped The Despatch," now retired to the as if we could translate the works of Jeremy Braes of Balquhidder, and breathing strongly Bentham into that tongue-ay, even Francis the spirit of his youth. With that heatherMaximus Macnab's Theory of the Universe. houghed gentleman, fiery-tressed as the God of We guaranty ourselves to do both, this iden- Day, we were, for the quarter of a century that tical night before we go to sleep, and if the we held a large grazing farm, in the annual printers are busy during the intermediate practice of drinking a gill at the Falkirk Tryst; hours, to correct the press in the morning. and-wonderful, indeed, to think how old Why, there are not above five thousand roots- friends meet, we were present at the amputabut we are getting a little gizzy-into a state tion of the right leg of that timber-toed hero of civilation in the wilderness-and, gentlemen, with the bushy whiskers-in the Hospital let us drink-in solemn silence-the" Memory of Rosetta-having accompanied Sir David of Fingal." Baird's splendid Indian army to Egypt.

O St. Cecilia! we did not lay our account Shying, for the present, the question in Powith a bagpipe! What is the competition of litical Economy, and viewing the subject in a pipers in the Edinburgh Theatre, small as it is, moral, social, and poetical light, what, pray, is to this damnable drone in an earth-cell, eight the true influence of THE STILL? It makes feet by six! Yet while the drums of our ears people idle. Idle? What species of idleness are continuing to split like old parchment title- is that which consists in being up night and deeds to lands nowhere existing, and all our day-traversing moors and mountains in all animal economy, from finger to toe, is one weathers-constantly contriving the most skilagonizing dirl, Eolus himself sits as proud ful expedients for misleading the Excise, and as Lucifer in Pandemonium; and as the old which, on some disastrous day, when dragoons soldiers keep tending the Worm in the reek as | suddenly shake the desert-when all is lost if all were silence, the male-looking females, except honour-hundreds of gallons of wash and especially the he-she with the imp at her (alas! alas! a-day!) wickedly wasted among treast, nod, and smirk, and smile, and snap the heather roots, and the whole beautiful Aptheir fingers, in a challenge to a straspey-paratus lying battered and spiritless in the sun and, by all that is horrible, a red hairy arm is round our neck, and we are half-choked with the fumes of whisky-kisses. An hour ago, we were dreaming of Malvina! and here she is with a vengeance, while we in the character of Oscar are embraced till almost all the Lowland breath in our body expires.

And this is STILL-LIFE?

beneath the accursed blows of the Pagans-returus, after a few weeks set apart to natural grief and indignation, with unabated energy, to the selfsame work, even within view of the former ruins, and pouring out a libation of the first amalgamated hotness that deserves the name of speerit, devotes the whole Board of Excise to the Infernal Gods?

The argument of idleness has not a leg to stand on, and falls at once to the ground. But the Still makes men dishonest. We grant that there is a certain degree of dishonesty in cheating the Excise; and we shall allow yourself to fix it, who give as fine a caulker from the sma' still, as any moral writer on Honesty with whom we have the pleasure occasionally to take a family dinner. But the poor fellows either grow or purchase their own malt. They do not steal it; and many is the silent benediction that we have breathed over a bit patch of barley, far up on its stoney soil among the hills, bethinking that it would yield up its precious spirit unexcised! Neither do they charge for it any very extravagant price-for what is twelve, fourteen, twenty shillings a gallon for such drink divine as is now steaming before us in that celestial caldron !

Extraordinary it is, that, go where we will, we are in a wonderfully short time discovered to be Christopher North. A few years ago, the instant we found our feet in a mine in Cornwall, after a descent of about one-third the bored earth's diameter, we were saluted by name by a grim Monops who had not seen the upper regions for years, preferring the interior of the planet; and forthwith, Christopher North, Christopher North," reverberated along the galleries, while the gnomes came flocking in all directions, with safety-lamps, to catch a glimpse of the famous Editor. On another occasion, we remember when coasting the south of Ireland in our schooner, falling in with a boat like a cockle-shell, well out of the Bay of Bantry, and of the three half-naked Paddies that were ensnaring the finny race, two smoked us at the helm, and bawled out, "Kitty go bragh!" Were we to go up in a Having thus got rid of the charge of idleballoon, and by any accident descend in the ness and dishonesty, nothing more needs to be interior of Africa, we have not the slightest said on the Moral Influence of the Still; and doubt that Sultan Belloo would know us in a we come now, in the second place, to consider jiffy, having heard our person so frequently it in a Social Light. The biggest bigot will described by Major Denham and Captain Clap-not dare to deny, that without whisky the perton. So we are known, it seems, in the Highlands of Scotland would be uninhabitable. Still-by the men of the Worm? Yes-the And if all the population were gone, or extinct, principal proprietor in the concern is a school-where then would be your social life? Smugmaster over about Loch-Earn-Head-a man of glers are seldom drunkards; neither are they no mean literary abilities, and an occasional men of boisterous manners or savage disposi contributor to the Magazine. He visits The tions. In general, they are grave, sedate, Shop in breeches-but now mounts the kilt-peaceable characters, not unlike elders of the and astonishes us by the versatility of his ta- kirk. Even Excisemen admit them, except on lents. In one of the most active working bees rare occasions, when human patience is exwe recognise a caddy, formerly in Auld Reeky hausted, to be merciful. Four pleasanter men

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do not now exist in the bosom of the earth, | Lamentations of Jeremiah over the sinful multhan the friends with whom we are now on the titude of Small Stills! Hypocrisy! hypocrisy! hobnob. Stolen waters are sweet-a profound where shalt thou hide thy many-coloured sides? and beautiful reflection-and no doubt origi- Whisky is found by experience to be, on nally made by some peripatetic philosopher at the whole, a blessing in so misty and mouna Still. The very soul of the strong drink eva-tainous a country. It destroys disease and baporates with the touch of the gauger's wand.nishes death; without some such stimulant An evil day would it indeed be for Scotland, the people would die of cold. You will see a that should witness the extinguishment of all fine old Gael, of ninety or a hundred, turn up her free and unlicensed mountain stills! The his little finger to a caulker with an air of pacharm of Highland hospitality would be wan triarchal solemnity altogether scriptural; his and withered, and the doch an dorras, instead great-grandchildren eyeing him with the most of a blessing, would sound like a ban. respectful affection, and the youngest of them We have said that smugglers are never toddling across the floor, to take the quech from drunkards, not forgetting that general rules are his huge, withered, and hairy hand, which he proved by exceptions; nay, we go farther, and lays on the amiable Joseph's sleek craniology, declare that the Highlanders are the soberest with a blessing heartier through the Glenlivet, people in Europe. Whisky is to them a cor- and with all the earnestness of religion. There dial, a medicine, a life-preserver. Chief of the is no disgrace in getting drunk-in the Highumbrella and wraprascal! were you ever in lands—not even if you are of the above standthe Highlands? We shall produce a single day ing-for where the people are so poor, such a from any of the fifty-two weeks of the year that state is but of rare occurrence; while it is felt will outargue you on the present subject, in all over the land of sleet and snow, that a "drap half-an-hour. What sound is that? The rush-o' the creatur" is a very necessary of life, and ing of rain from heaven, and the sudden outcry of a thousand waterfalls. Look through a chink in the bothy, and far as you can see for the mists, the heath-covered desert is steaming like the smoke of a smouldering fire. Winds biting as winter come sweeping on their invisible chariots armed with scythes, down every glen, and scatter far and wide over the mountains the spray of the raging lochs. Now you have a taste of the summer cold, more dangerous far than that of Yule, for it often strikes "aitches" into the unprepared bones, and congeals the blood of the shelterless shepherd on the hill. But one glorious gurgle of the speerit down the throat of a storm-stayed man! and bold as a rainbow he faces the reappearing sun, and feels assured (though there he may be mistaken) of dying at a good old age.

Then think, oh think, how miserably poor are most of those men who have fought our battles, and so often reddened their bayonets in defence of our liberties and our laws! Would you grudge them a little whisky? And, depend upon it, a little is the most, taking one day of the year with another, that they imbibe. You figure to yourself two hundred thousand Highlanders, taking snuff, and chewing tobacco, and drinking whisky, all year long. Why, one pound of snuff, two of tobacco, and two gallons of whisky, would be beyond the mark of the yearly allowance of every grown-up man! Thousands never taste such luxuries at all-meal and water, potatoes and salt, their only food. The animal food, sir, and the fermented liquors of various kinds, Foreign and British, which to our certain knowledge you have swallowed within the last twelve months, would have sufficed for fifty families in our abstemious region of mist and snow. We have known you drink a bottle of champagne, a bottle of port, and two bottles of claret, frequently at a sitting, equal, in prime cost, to three gallons of the best Glenlivet! And You (who, by the way, are an English clergyman, a circumstance we had entirely forgotten, and have published a Discourse against Drunkenness, dedicated to a Bishop) pour forth the

that but for its "dew" the mountains would be uninhabitable. At fairs, and funerals, and marriages, and suchlike merry meetings, sobriety is sent to look after the sheep; but, except on charitable occasions of that kind, sobriety stays at home among the peat-reek, and is contented with crowdy. Who that ever stooped his head beneath a Highland hut would grudge a few gallons of Glenlivet to its poor but unrepining inmates? The seldomer they get drunk the better-and it is but seldom they do so; but let the rich man-the monied moralist, who bewails and begrudges the Gael a modicum of the liquor of life, remember the doom of a certain Dives, who, in a certain place that shall now be nameless, cried, but cried in vain for a drop of water. Lord bless the Highlanders, say we, for the most harmless, hospitable, peaceable, brave people that ever despised breeches, blue pibrochs, took invincible standards, and believed in the authenticity of Ossian's poems. In that pure and lofty region ignorance is not, as elsewhere, the mother of vice-penury cannot repress the noble rage of the mountaineer as "he sings aloud old songs that are the music of the heart;" while superstition herself has an elevating influence, and will be suffered, even by religion, to show her shadowy shape and mutter her wild voice through the gloom that lies on the heads of the remote glens, and among the thousand caves of echo in her iron-bound coasts dashed on for ever-night and day-summer and winterby those sleepless seas, who have no sooner laid their heads on the pillow than up they start with a howl that cleaves the Orcades, and away off in search of shipwrecks round the corner of Cape Wrath.

In the third place, what shall we say of the poetical influence of STILLS? What more poetical life can there be than that of the men with whom we are now quaffing the barleybree? They live with the moon and stars. All the night winds are their familiars. If there be such things as ghosts, and fairies, and apparitions-and that there are, no man who has travelled much by himself after sunset will

deny, except from the mere love of contradic-attack your corpse from the worm-holes of the tion-they see them; or when invisible, which earth. Corbies, ravens, hawks, eagles, all the they generally are, hear them-here-there- feathered furies of beak and bill, will come everywhere-in sky, forest, cave, or hollow- flying ere sunset to anticipate the maggots, and sounding world immediately beneath their carry your remains-if you will allow us to feet. Many poets walk these wilds; nor do call them so-over the whole of Argyleshire in their songs perish. They publish not with many living sepulchres. We confess ourselves Blackwood or with Murray-but for centuries unable to see the solitude of this-and begin on centuries, such songs are the preservers, to agree with Byron, that a man is less often the sources, of the oral traditions that go crowded at a masquerade. glimmering and gathering down the stream of years. Native are they to the mountains as the blooming heather, nor shall they ever cease to invest them with the light of poetry-in defiance of large farms, Methodist preachers, and the Caledonian Canal.

People are proud of talking of solitude. It redounds, they opine, to the honour of their great-mindedness to be thought capable of living, for an hour or two, by themselves, at a considerable distance from knots or skeins of their fellow-creatures. Byron, again, thought he showed his superiority, by swearing as solemnly as a man can do in the Spenserian stanza, that

"To sit alone, and muse o'er flood and fell,"

has nothing whatever to do with solitude-and that, if you wish to know and feel what solitude really is, you must go to Almack's.

"This-this is solitude-this is to be alone!"

But the same subject may be illustrated less tragically, and even with some slight comic effect. A man among mountains is often surrounded on all sides with mice and moies. What cozy nests do the former construct at the roots of heather, among tufts of grass in the rushes, and the moss on the greensward! As for the latter, though you think you know a mountain from a molehill, you are much mistaken; for what is a mountain, in many cases, but a collection of molehills-and of fairy knolls?—which again introduce a new element into the composition, and show, in still more glaring colours, your absurdity in supposing yourself to be in solitude. The "Silent People" are around you at every step. You may not see them-for they are dressed in invisible green; but they see you, and that unaccountable whispering and buzzing sound one often hears in what we call the wilderness, what is it, or what can it be, but the fairies

to each other the extreme silliness of your meditative countenance, and laughing like to split at your fond conceit of being alone among a multitude of creatures far wiser than your self.

His Lordship's opinions were often peculiar-making merry at your expense, pointing out but the passage has been much admired; therefore we are willing to believe that the Great Desert is, in point of loneliness, unable to stand a philosophical, much less a poetical comparison, with a well-frequented fancy-ball. But is the statement not borne out by facts? Zoology is on its side-more especially two of its most interesting branches, Entomology and Ornithology.

But should all this fail to convince you, that you are never less alone than when you think yourself alone, and that a man never knows what it is to be in the very heart of life till he leaves London, and takes a walk in GlenEtive-suppose yourself to have been leaning with your back against that knoll, dreaming of the far-off race of men, when all at once the support gives way inwards, and you tumble head over heels in among a snug coterie of kilted Celts, in the very act of creating Glenlivet in a great warlock's caldron, seething to the top with the Spirit of Life!

Go to a desert and clap your back against a cliff. Do you think yourself alone? What a ninny! Your great clumsy splay feet are bruising to death a batch of beetles. See that spider whom you have widowed, running up and down your elegant leg, in distraction and despair, bewailing the loss of a husband who, however savage to the ephemerals, had always smiled sweetly upon her. Meanwhile, your shoulders have crushed a colony of small Such fancies as these, among many others, red ants settled in a moss city beautifully were with us in the Still. But a glimmering roofed with lichens-and that accounts for the and a humming and a dizzy bewilderment sharp tickling behind your ear, which you hangs over that time and place, finally dying keep scratching, no Solomon, in ignorance of away into oblivion. Here are we sitting in a the cause of that effect. Should you sit down glade of a birch-wood in what must be Gleno -we must beg to draw a veil over your hur--some miles from the Still. Hamish asleep, dies, which at the moment extinguish a fearful amount of animal life-creation may be said to groan under them; and, insect as you are yourself, you are defrauding millions of insects of their little day. All the while you are supposing yourself alone! Now are you not, as we hinted, a prodigious ninny? But the whole wilderness-as you choose to call it -is crawling with various life. London, with its million and a half of inhabitants-including of course its suburbs-is, compared with it, an empty joke. Die-and you will soon be picked to the bones. The air swarms with sharmers-and an insurrection of radicals will quechs! By

as usual, whenever he lies down, and all the dogs yowffing in dreams, and Surefoot standing with his long beard above ours, almost the same in longitude. We have been more, we suspect, than half-seas over, and are now lying on the shore of sobriety, almost a wreck. The truth is, that the new spirit is even more dangerous than the new light. Both at first dazzle, then obfuscate, and lastly darken into temporary death. There is, we fear, but one word of one syllable in the English language that could fully express our late condition. Let our readers solve the enigma. Oh! those

"What drugs, what spells,

FLIGHT FOURTH-DOWN RIVER AND
UP LOCH.

What conjurations, and what mighty magic," was Christopher overthrown! A strange conLET us inspect the state of Brown Bess. fusion of sexes, as of men in petticoats and Right barrel empty-left barrel-what is the women in breeches-gowns transmogrified meaning of this?-crammed to the muzzle! into jackets-caps into bonnets-and thick Ay, that comes on visiting Stills. We have naked hairy legs into slim ankles decent in been snapping away at the coveys and single hose-all somewhere whirling and dancing by, birds all over the moor, without so much as a dim and obscure, to the sound of something pluff, with the right-hand cock-and then, groaning and yelling, sometimes inarticulate-imagining that we had fired, have kept loading ly, as if it came from something instrumental, and then mixed up with a wild gibberish, as if shrieking, somehow or other, from living lips, human and brute-for a dream of yowling dogs is over all-utterly confounds us as we strive to muster in recollection the few last hours that have passed tumultuously through our brain-and then a wide black moor, sometimes covered with day, sometimes with night, stretches around us, hemmed in on all sides by the tops of mountains, seeming to reel in the sky. Frequent flashes of fire, and a whirring as of the wings of birds-but sound and sight alike uncertain-break again upon our dream. Let us not mince the matter-we can afford the confession-we have been overtaken by liquor-sadly intoxicated-out with it at once! Frown not, fairest of all sweet-for we lay our calamity, not to the charge of the Glenlivet circling in countless quechs, but at the door of that inveterate enemy to sobriety-the Fresh

Air.

But now we are as sober as a judge. Pity our misfortune-rather than forgive our sin. We entered that Still in a State of innocence before the Fall. Where we fell, we know not -in divers ways and sundry places-between that magic cell on the breast of Benachochie, and this glade in Gleno. But,

"There are worse things in life than a fall among heather."

Surefoot, we suppose, kept himself tolerably sober-and O'Bronte, at each successive cloit, must have assisted us to remount-for Hamish, from his style of sleeping, must have been as bad as his master; and, after all, it is wonder ful to think how we got here-over hags and mosses, and marshes and quagmires, like those in which "armies whole have sunk." But the truth is, that never in the whole course of our lives and that course has been a strange one -did we ever so often as once lose our way. Set us down blindfolded on Zahara, and we will beat the caravan to Timbuctoo. Something or other mysteriously indicative of the right direction touches the soles of our feet in the shape of the ground they tread; and even when our souls have gone soaring far away, or have sunk within us, still have our feet pursued the shortest and the safest path that leads to the bourne of our pilgrimage. Is not that strange? But not stranger surely than the flight of the bee, on his first voyage over the coves of the wilderness to the far-off heather-bells-or of the dove that is sent by some Jew stockjobber, to communicate to Dutchmen the rise or fall of the funds, from London to Hamburgh, from the clear shores of silver Thames to the muddy shallows of the ZuyderZee.

away at the bore to the left, till, see! the ramrod absolutely stands upright in the air, with only about three inches hidden in the hollow! What a narrow-a miraculous escape has the world had of losing Christopher North! Had he drawn that trigger instead of this, Brown Bess would have burst to a moral certainty, and blown the old gentleman piecemeal over the heather. "In the midst of life we are in death!" Could we but know one in a bundred of the close approachings of the skeleton, we should lead a life of perpetual shudder. Often and often do his bony fingers almost clutch our throat, or his foot is put out to give us a cross-buttock. But a saving arm pulls him back, ere we have seen so much as his shadow. We believe all this-but the belief that comes not from something steadfastly present before our eyes, is barren; and thus it is, since believing is not seeing, that we walk hoodwinked nearly all our days, and worst of all blindness is that of ingratitude and forgetfulness of Him whose shield is for ever over us, and whose mercy shall be with us in the world beyond the grave.

By all that is most beautifully wild in animated nature, a Roe! a Roe! Shall we slay him where he stands, or let him vanish in silent glidings in among his native woods? What a fool for asking ourselves such a question! Slay him where he stands to be in his leafy lairs, a life of leisure, delight, and sure-for many pleasant seasons hath he led love, and the hour is come when he must sink down on his knees in a sudden and unpainful death-fair silvan dreamer! We have drawn that multitudinous shot-and both barrels of Brown Bess now are loaded with ball-for Hamish is yet lying with his head on the rifle. Whiz! whiz! one is through lungs, and another through neck-and seemingly rather to sleep than die, (so various are the many modes of expiration!)

"In quietness he lays him down Gently, as a weary wave Sinks, when the summer breeze has died, Against an anchor'd vessel's side." Ay-Hamish-you may start to your feetand see realized the vision of your sleep. What a set of distracted dogs! But O'Bronte first catches sight of the quarry-and clearing, with grasshopper spangs, the patches of stunted coppice, stops stock-still beside the roe in the glade, as if admiring and wondering at the beauty of the fair spotted creature! Yes, dogs have a sense of the beautiful. Else how can you account for their loving so to lie down at the feet and lick the hands of the virgin whose eyes are mild, and forehead meek, and hair of placid sunshine, rather than act the same part towards ugly women, who,

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