family had need of it. He felt himself indeed almost the father of
the deer as well as of his clan, and mourned greatly that he could
do so little now, from the limited range of his property, to protect
them. His love for live creatures was not quite equal to that of St.
Francis, for he had not conceived the thought of turning wolf or fox
from the error of his ways; but even the creatures that preyed upon
others he killed only from a sense of duty, and with no pleasure in
their death. The heartlessness of the common type of sportsman was
loathsome to him. When there was not much doing on the farm, he
would sometimes be out all night with his gun, it is true, but he
would seldom fire it, and then only at some beast of prey; on the
hill-side or in the valley he would lie watching the ways and doings
of the many creatures that roam the night--each with its object,
each with its reasons, each with its fitting of means to ends. One
of the grounds of his dislike to the new possessors of the old land
was the raid he feared upon the wild animals.

The laird gone, I will take my reader into the PARLOUR, as they
called in English their one sitting-room. Shall I first tell him
what the room was like, or first describe the two persons in it? Led
up to a picture, I certainly should not look first at the frame; but
a description is a process of painting rather than a picture; and
when you cannot see the thing in one, but must take each part by
itself, and in your mind get it into relation with the rest, there
is an advantage, I think, in having a notion of the frame first. For
one thing, you cannot see the persons without imagining their
surroundings, and if those should be unfittingly imagined, they
interfere with the truth of the persons, and you may not be able to
get them right after.