boar has assured me that the animal cannot get very far away, and that by persevering in following his track by the blood that flowed from him in such abundance, it is easy enough to find, and despatch him at leisure. This man is too cunning himself to permit the animal to escape. He will do this himself when we give up; he will follow the trail alone. You comprehend me?" "Yes, I understand." "Well, then, be secret. You must know that I am determined to anticipate the man, and to follow the track of the beast myself to the very last yes, that I am. Ay, even if I go for it to the columns of Hercules or march to the world's end, like the Wandering Jew. You will come with me, won't you? You shall be my Nisus, I will be your Euryalus. What a glorious thing for us if we should be successful! Something tells me we shall. What risk do we run in making the attempt? None at all! We have only to make a pretence of having lost our party."

"The more adventurous the risk, the more agreeable to me," I observed. "Lead on!"

We stole away: it was easily done where the undergrowth happened to be dense, and we were out of sight in a moment. Behold us gliding furtively among the bushes like two terriers scenting blood. The rest of our friends had no anxiety about our absence. The professor had taken care to give no one else of the party even a half confidence of his design, as they would have laughed at him in their sleeve as a half-sportsman. No matter; we set out, oftentimes finding, and as often missing the trail, which it cost us some time to fall in with again. One, two hours passed in this way. Was there never to be an end to our uulucky pursuit, so secret and still so luckless.

"Soho, soho!" cried the professor.

"What have you found?" I exclaimed. "See, see, what I have picked up!"

"What the deuce! One of the tusks of the boar, as I live! No doubt vomited with the blood he has brought up.'

"He is wounded in the head, no doubt he is half dead."
"Courage," I replied; "we shall find him."

"Provided he has not much strength left. Otherwise-
"What, are you still afraid!"

"Me afraid! Forward, my friend. You will see."

Upon this the professor put on a valiant countenance, after examining the tusk, which he put carefully into his pocket. Both of them then began to search among the brushwood. No other part of the boar came to light. The trace was, however, found anew, but not without great pains from unaccustomed sportsmen. It was followed without success, and again lost, then found and followed again.

April-VOL, CXLIV. NO. DLXXX.

2 G

It was evening, in the midst of a small cluster of houses, when the pair come up to the wounded animal, now scarcely able to drag itself along. Between them three discharges of these jolly huntsmen were requisite to place the hog at their mercy. Perhaps one would have sufficed with other sportsmen. The two would fain be deemed clever sportsmen. There they stood, one on each side of the animal, and, after a minute or two of conversation, burst out into a loud laugh. The one coolly seated himself upon the dead animal and lit a cigar. The professor literally danced for joy, then sang a stanza and danced again.

To return to the party they had left when they set out to trace the boar. They had all got for momentary shelter into a cottage, in order to recount the labours and result of the day's sport, after the death of a noble stag. They could boast of no more, save the deer, to divide among them all-the deer that had been killed early in the day. At the same time they were lost in conjecture as to what had become of their two friends, who had been missing since noon-perhaps lost their way. One said a wolf had eaten them up; others that they had become bewildered in the forest.

"If the wolf has eaten the professor, he will have swallowed his gun and game-bag of yellow leather as well,' observed another. "They have run down the animal's oesophagus together."

"He is a famous sportsman, for all that," said a third of the party. "He kills only when no one is in his company."

At that moment the door of the hut opened suddenly, and a dead wild boar of enormous size was brought in upon the shoulders of four woodmen, who could barely carry it. The professor and his companion brought up the rear. The former, extending his hand and pointing to the boar, said:

"This is our game, gentlemen. I have promised the 'hure.' It is subject to my promise to a lady where I live. I present all the rest to you, gentlemen, as my contribution to a future feast. I never hunted down a boar of such a size before. Am I not an adept?"

It was remarked with what peculiar emphasis he pronounced the letter I-how the sound was intended to be an echo to the sense, and to convey an idea of a prowess that was exhibited in no other manner in relation to the wounded game than has been stated. Human vanity is multifarious in the modes of its exhibition, and to get undue credit is often more grateful than that which has the consciousness of meriting it. Who would imagine that our friend had, as an Irishman would say, "only killed the game over again."

SIMON FRASER, LORD LOVAT.

TOWARDS the close of the seventeenth century, Simon Fraser and his father, "Thomas of Beaufort," poor relations of the Chief of the Frasers, had the pleasure of finding themselves next in suc cession to the Lovat peerage and extensive family estates. An heiress there was; but Lovat was a male fief, and "Lassie heir no richt heir" was a favourite maxim with the Frasers. The Chief himself, Lord Lovat, seems to have been a weak and witless personage, with whom Simon and his sire did very much as they liked, and whom they seldom let out of their own eyesight and earshot. It is said that Simon was virtually, and most unvirtuously, the death of him, by inciting him to all sorts of debauchery, during a visit they made together to London,-the result of which profligate excess on the abused peer's part, was disease and death. Father Thomas has the credit of having edified with pious discourse that death-bed, which Son Simon has the discredit of having brought about. Be that as it may, Father Thomas lost no time in assuming the title of his departed kinsman, and claiming the estates; while Son Simon took, as heir-apparent, the style of the Master of Lovat, and was no longer to be familiarly quoted as the Captain.

What the Captain had been, the Master was,—and what the Master was, Lord Lovat was to be,-most plausible and most perfidious. A clever vulpine intellect was Simon's-not without that vulpine humour as well as craft which the old fables, many of them, assign to versatile Maître Reynard. Mr. J. Hill Burton proves him to have been a man of great natural ability, and of considerable acquirements in learning and general culture. At Aberdeen he appears to have laid the foundation of that acquaintance with the classics, which he was so fond of illustrating by more or less apt quotation and allusion, throughout his long life. But sagacious and accomplished as he may have been, it must have been his plausible manners and wheedling ways, his tact in flattery, his shrewd penetration of character, his adroit management of other folks' foibles, and his masterly concealment of his own duplicity, to which in the main he was indebted for success in life -such success, at least, as ends in proscription and the scaffold.

For years and years the Master of Lovat carried on an obstinate struggle against the law (which bore hardly upon him as a suspected Jacobite) and the powerful family of Athole, to which the heiress of Lovat was near of kin; struggled against them by fraud and by force, by roundabout chicanery and by straightforward

iniquity, to make sure of the "Lovat country" in all its ample breadth, and eventually establish his claim to the peerage. Simon persuaded the young heiress to elope with him-a scheme which broke down, her Athole kinsmen removing the young lady for safety to Dunkeld, and negotiating for her immediate marriage with a Lowland Fraser, the Lord Saltoun. Meanwhile, the Highland Fraser, Simon the subtle, was making himself more and more popular in the "Lovat country" by the dash and daring of his unscrupulous character. Many loved him, some feared him, but by nearly all he was regarded with interest, if not fascination, as a man of mettle and mark. A band of devoted clansmen gathered round him, whose services were at his beck and call, for enterprises however dangerous and however unjust. With their aid he became, in effect, military master of the country. One of his achievements was the defeating a company of gentlemen, which comprised his rival Lord Saltoun, Lord Mungo Murray, and others of high degree, on their way northwards to visit Lady Lovat, the mother of the heiress; the noble lords being captured by Simon, committed to prison, and treated to a full view of the tall gallows erected on the spot for their behoof. That same evening, hundreds came flocking to the standard of the Master, who had thus signally appealed to arms in his father's cause and his own; and that same night, Castle Dounie, the stronghold of the Lovats, was seized, the lady made prisoner, and horrible scenes of polluted ruffianism perpetrated under that roof tree. Simon afterwards set aside the forced marriage thus brought about, and during the prolonged life of this unhappy lady, he ventured on two other matches,-one of them with a scion of the Argyle family, who entirely sanctioned the inauspicious alliance. It is said that Lady Lovat "forgave and was reconciled to the ruffianly felon, who, in the perpetration of what would seem a purely gratuitous crime, seems more like a wretch under the influence of demoniac possession, than a reasonable being, acting even upon the basest of conceivable human motives. The unfortunate woman remained in his power; and if ever reconciled, her magnanimity only blackens his guilt, when we are told that he at last treated the brutal assault and forced ceremony as a youthful frolic, which no way impeded him, when the time came, from contracting alliances which might better advance his views of interest or ambition." The law he set at defiance; the military, sent from time to time, to apprehend not only Son Simon, but Father Thomas, and the clansmen who clave to them, and without qualm or question did their behests, these, too, the Master of Lovat and his own particular "following" contrived to evade, or to rout, and in either case to laugh to scorn.

Father and son were outlawed both. Time rolled on, and the elder Lovat was gathered to his fathers; and the increasing in

fluence of the Atholes, after the accession of Queen Anne, made it desirable for the lawless object of their hate to retire beyond seas. So to France Simon made his way for a while, and there exercised his facile arts of political intrigue. Now he traded with "the Elector's party," at the expense of the Jacobites; and then again, with St. Germain's against St. James's; or probably with both at once each against each-as grossly as ever Falstaff committed himself with the merry wives of Windsor, both at the same time. Like the fat knight, Simon met with disconcerting exposure. More than once he had to beat a retreat from the scene of operations. With so many irons in the fire, he burnt his own fingers. He so plotted, and counterplotted, as to checkmate himself.

The Court of St. Germain's had so little faith in this supple adventurer, that for a considerable period of his sojourn in France, official spies kept note of his every movement, and detectives knew, quite literally, where to have him, if (professionally speaking) "wanted." He is even said to have passed a portion of his time in the Bastille. But the history of his Continental experiences is altogether obscure-enough so to afford scope for a variety of odd rumours. Thus, by some accounts, he was received into the Society of the Jesuits, and became a popular preacher, unctuous exceedingly, quite a duck of a pulpiteer to "sit under." If so, the metamorphosis did not prevent his keeping up his credit with the clan, in his ain countrie, by a sustained series of epistles, in which his adherents were, as occasion might warrant, cajoled and coaxed with all sorts of promises, or reproved, rebuked, exhorted with all authority.

Nor was un-simple Simon forgetful to curry favour with the House of Hanover. He quite gained the heart of the Elector's party by his services on that side in the Rebellion of 1715. After his escape from France, and on the seeming strength of his zeal against the "Jacobite rebels," he so ingratiated himself with the Government, and so insinuated himself into the good graces of "sound Whigs and true Protestants," even of the sage and sober Duncan Forbes type, that he was appointed Sheriff of Invernessshire, and was otherwise entrusted with powers of perilous issue in such reckless hands.

For there can be little doubt of Mr. Burton's correctness in believing that Simon's inclinations were always with the Jacobites. As one of that gentleman's reviewers has observed, Simon was led astray by interest, ambition, and the love of intrigue for its own sake: but his heart ever reverted to its first love. "And, besides, he had nothing more to gain from the new dynasty for the personal aggrandisement of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. His estates were secured, his peerage was recognised, he enjoyed offices of