'Attempt and Did-not were the two worst hounds of Fingal,' muttered Angus, in his Perthshire Gaelic, with a furtive glance, fall of meaning, at Stratherroch.
'To the genuine Highlander,' says a recent English writer, 'it is a fixed article of belief that there never yet was a Sassenach who knew more about the wind and weather, or about the innumerable other mysteries which furnish the stalker with the tact and skill required to perfect him in his difficult craft, than a cow understands of conic sections. With true Celtic caution and prudence, the gillies tolerate the opulent tenant from the south out of respect for his cheque-book and his frequent drafts upon it; but in their hearts they look upon him as an intruder, and are not sorry when they contemplate his receding form, as he turns his face homewards, and leaves moor, loch, and mountain, glen and forest to 'their natural denizens.'
And in this spirit Angus was secretly regarding the unconscious Mr. Holcroft, who had the genuine Southern idea that no man of woman born could undervalue him.
So the little shooting-party united now, and, not unwillingly, all sat down to have luncheon, as they were sharply appetised by long exercise in the keen mountain air, and on no other tablecloth than the purple heather; the ample contents of a hamper—game pies, cold beef, bread, champagne (cooled in an adjacent runnel), whisky, and so forth—were laid out by the active hands of the gillies, expectant of their own repast when the time came.
They lunched near the mossy ruins of a clachan—some of those melancholy ruins so common over all the Highlands, the traces of a departed people who have passed away to other lands, evicted by grasping selfishness to make way for grouse and deer.
There, the low, shattered gables, an old well, some gooseberry bushes that marked 'where a garden had been,' were all that remained of a once populous village, whose men had often gone forth to fight for Scotland in the wars of old, and whose descendants in latter years had manned more than one company of the Black Watch in Egypt and the Peninsula.
On the sunny hill-slope close by, a ruined wall, low and circular—above which appeared the grey arms of a solitary Celtic cross, an aged yew-tree, and where long grass waved in the wind—marked where lay the last of the clan, whom no human power could evict or send towards the setting sun; and these imparted a melancholy to the solemn scenery, for solemn it was with all its beauty.
It was of that kind peculiar to some parts of Perthshire, where the subordinate hills, rising a thousand feet and more above the valley, are entirely covered with dusky pines, taking away all that appearance of blackness and desolation presented by naked mountain masses, and adding softness and beauty to the landscape, which would otherwise be stern and grim. Nor were the glassy loch and the murmuring torrent wanting there, nor those passes where the mountains approach each other, and make them, like that of Killiecrankie, excel even the famous Vale of Tempe.
Though not very impressionable by Nature, Holcroft, influenced by the good things he was imbibing, said something about the beauty of the scenery, to which Lord Aberfeldie responded, adding, with a laugh,
'I do enjoy life in a shooting-box, and of all the entrancing sports to me there is none like stalking the deer.'