"Very well, sir; how many will I put up?"
"All you've got," was the prompt reply.
Mr. Watson stared.
"Oh, yes," Lionel said. "Miss Cunyngham may as well have a good stock at once. You know the proper kinds—Blue Doctors, Childerses, Jock Scotts, Dirty Yellows, Bishops, Bees—that's about it, isn't it?—and put in plenty of various sizes. Then don't make a parcel of them; put them into those japanned boxes with the cork in them—never mind how many; and if you can't tell me at once how much it will all come to, I will leave you my London address, and you'll send the bill to me. Now if you will be so kind as to give me a sheet of paper and an envelope, I will write a note to accompany the packet."
Mr. Watson probably thought that this young man was daft, but it was not his business to say so; he took down his erratic customer's address and said that all his instructions would be attended to forthwith.
Next Lionel went to a tobacconist's shop, and (for he was a most lavish young man) he ordered a prodigious quantity of "twist," which he had made up into two parcels, the smaller one for Roderick, the larger to be divided equally among the other keepers and gillies. The two parcels he had put into a wooden case, which, again, was filled up with boxes of vesuvians, three or four dozen or so; and it is to be imagined that when that small hamper was opened at Strathaivron there was many a chuckle of gratification over the division of the splendid spoil.
Finally—for human nature is but human nature after all; he had been thinking of others so far, and he was now entitled to consider himself a little—he thought he would go along to Mr. Macleay's. When he arrived at the shop, he glanced in at the windows; but among the wild-cats, ptarmigan, black game, mallards, and what not, there was nothing to arrest his attention; it was a stag's head he had in his mind. He went inside, and his first sensation was one of absolute bewilderment. This crowded museum of birds, beasts, and fish—skarts, goosanders, sand-grouse, terns, eagles, ospreys, squirrels, foxes, big-snouted trout, harts, hinds, bucks, does, owls, kestrels, falcons, merlins, and every variety of the common gull shot by the all-pervading Cockney—staring, stuffed, silent, they were a confusion to the eyes, and nowhere could he find his own, his particular, his precious
stag. Alas! when Mr. Macleay was so kind as to take him behind into the workshop—which resembled a huge shambles, almost—and when, from among the vast number of heads and horns lying and hanging everywhere around, the Strathaivron head was at last produced, Lionel was horribly shocked and disappointed. Was this, then, his trophy that he hoped to have hung up for the admiration of his friends and his own ecstatic contemplation—this twisted, shapeless, sightless lump of hide and hair, with a great jaw of discolored teeth gleaming from under its flabby folds? It is true that here were the identical horns, for had he not gone lovingly over every tine of them?—but was this rag of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather? However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him. He was shown the various processes and stages of the taxidermist's art, the amorphous mass of skin and hair gradually taking shape and substance until it stood forth in all its glory of flaming eye and proud nostril and branching antlers; and he was highly pleased to be told that this head he had got in Strathaivron was a fairly good one, as stags now go in the North. So, all his shopping being done, he set off again for the Station Hotel, where he got what he wanted in the shape of dinner, followed by a long and meditative smoke in the billiard-room, with visions appearing among the curls of blue vapor.
What the Highland Railway manages to do with the trains which it despatches from Inverness at 10 P.M. and reproduces the next morning at Perth about 7, it is impossible for the mind of man to imagine; but it is not of much consequence so long as you are snugly ensconced in a sleeping-berth; and Lionel passed the night in profound oblivion. With the new day, however, these unavailing and torturing regrets began again; for now he felt himself more completely than before shut off from the friends he had left; and Strathaivron and all its associations and pursuits had grown distant like a dream. He was lucky enough, on this southward journey, to get a compartment to himself; and here was an excellent opportunity for him to have practised his vocalises; but it was not of vocalises, nor of anything connected with the theatre, that he was thinking. He was much franker with himself now. He no longer tried to conceal from himself the cause of this vague unrest, this useless
looking back and longing, this curious downhearted sense of solitariness. A new experience, truly, and a bewildering one! Indeed, he was ashamed of his own folly. For what was it that he wanted? A mere continuance of that friendly alliance and companionship which he had enjoyed all this time? Was he indulging a sort of sentimental misery simply because he could not walk down to the Aivron's banks and talk to Miss Honnor and watch the sun tracing threads of gold among her tightly braided hair? If that were all, he might get out at the next station, make his way back to the beloved strath, and be sure that Honnor Cunyngham would welcome him just as of old, and allow him to carry her waterproof or ask him to have a cast over the Junction Pool. He had no reason to fear any break in this friendship that had been formed. When he should see her in Brighton, she would be to him as she had been yesterday, when they said good-bye by the side of the river. And were not these the only possible relations between them; and ought he not to be proud and content that he could look forward to an enduring continuance of them?