hand, with a gillie in attendance. The dogs started a fine buck, which
ran close to them, but instead of leveling his gun, Landseer shoved the
weapon into the hands of the astonished gillie with the hurried whispered
request, "Here, you, hold this for me!" and seizing his pencil, made a
hasty sketch of the gallant buck ere the vision could fade from memory.

In fact, both Landseer and Leslie proved poor sportsmen--they had no
heart for killing things.

A beautiful live deer was a deal more pleasing to Landseer than a dead
one; and he might truthfully have expressed the thought of his mind by
saying, "A bird in the bush is worth two on a woman's bonnet." And indeed
he did anticipate Thoreau by saying, "To shoot a bird is to lose it."

The idea of following deer with dogs and guns, simply for the sport of
killing them, was repugnant to the soul of this sensitive, tender-hearted
man.

In the faces of his deer he put a look of mingled grandeur and pain--a
half-pathos, as if foreshadowing their fate.

In picturing the dogs and donkeys, he was full of jest and merriment; but
the kings of moor and forest called forth deeper and sadder sentiments.

That wild animals instinctively flee in frenzied alarm at man's approach
is comment enough on our treatment of them.

The deer, so gentle and so graceful, so innocent and so beautiful, are
never followed by man except as a destroyer; and the idea of looking down
a rifle-barrel into the wide-open, soulful eyes of a deer made Landseer