Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 49 CHAPTER III THE HARE AND THE LAWYERS After the middle of August the daylight in the North of Scotland is sadly curtailed. The day seems only half spent when a certain stillness falls upon the landscape. In the near foreground a sudden glow of crimson light fires the hayfields into a ruddy blaze. The distant hills exchange the varied colours of the afternoon for a soft and delicate tone of iron grey. As I pen my thoughts in a beautiful Perthshire glen (unwilling to turn my face homeward, in spite of the persistent attacks of swarms of black and angry midges) the hollows and fissures which line yon mural precipices become indistinct at first, then cease to be visible. The rugged outline of the heights which hem in the horizon alone remains unaltered. The black wood which crowns the rounded hill to the right is a famous deer forest. The pine-trees which grow upon the slopes of the hill stand out stiffly against a column of violet cloud ; they look for allthe world like an army of Highland warriors, ranged as it were shoulder to shoulder. A little further to the north their fellows start up irregularly against the skyline. Their desolation witnesses to the terrible force of the tornado which devastated that and many another goodly forest during the darkness of a winter night. The natural terraces which run parallel to one another on the nearer braes are red with heather, still retaining the pride of maturity. Swiftly as the rays of light are departing, I can just detect the touch of autumn in the dulled tone of the leaves that still cluster closely to the twigs of the roadway lime-tree. Suddenly my reverie is interrupted by the sharp crack of a farmer's gun. Instantly it travels across the water below, assuring me of the untimely sorrow which has overtaken the blue ' cu...