a dozen chamois whisk around the next rock-buttress, and "one more
unfortunate" tumbles from the verge into vacancy. The labor of days is
rewarded. Securing the scanty venison if he can, the hunter is off for
his hillside burrow, advertising his approach by an exultant jodel of
extra nerve-splitting power.

In Great Britain the rifle, ancient or modern, like, indeed, any other
firearm, has yet to establish itself as a democratic "institution."
Her forests are not forests in our sense, and her mountain-dwellers
know little of the rifle. In the duke of Athol's seventy-mile forest,
with scarce a tree save planted larches, the stag roams by thousands,
but of course the game-laws interpose, as they did eight hundred years
ago, between him and the (biped) hind. He is still the reserved
luxury of the Norman. So with the leagues of upland where His Grace of
Sutherland has made the Highlander give place to the hart, the "lassie
wi' the lint-white locks" to the Cheviot ewe--where, in short, the
white Celt has been improved out of existence as remorselessly as the
red man in America, and that in favor not of a superior race of men,
but of _feræ naturæ_. Into these and similar districts, at stated
seasons, sundry squads of gentlemen are turned loose. They either
"pay their shot," as _Punch_ has it, in the shape of rent, or are the
guests of the noble proprietors. Their devices for circumventing the
antlered monarch of the waste are amply detailed by Scrope, Hawker,
Herbert and also by the late Edwin Landseer doing the pictorial
department with a success attributable chiefly to his management of
landscape effect, for his dogs, deer and other animals from his Æsop's
fable-like groups to his four duplicated lions in Trafalgar Square,
belong--heretic that we are to say it!--properly to still life, their
want of action and _verve_ placing them beneath comparison with the
works of either one of a score of Flemish and French painters,