remain there nearly a year; and we went up ourselves to fetch him home.
Down the long avenue toward the keeper's cottage we walked: It was high
autumn; there had been frost already, for the ground was fine with red
and yellow leaves; and presently we saw himself coming; professionally
questing among those leaves, and preceding his dear keeper with the
businesslike self-containment of a sportsman; not too fat, glossy as a
raven's wing, swinging his ears and sporran like a little Highlander. We
approached him silently. Suddenly his nose went up from its imagined
trail, and he came rushing at our legs. From him, as a garment drops
from a man, dropped all his strange soberness; he became in a single
instant one fluttering eagerness. He leaped from life to life in one
bound, without hesitation, without regret. Not one sigh, not one look
back, not the faintest token of gratitude or regret at leaving those good
people who had tended him for a whole year, buttered oat-cake for him,
allowed him to choose each night exactly where he would sleep. No, he
just marched out beside us, as close as ever he could get, drawing us on
in spirit, and not even attending to the scents, until the lodge gates
were passed.

It was strictly in accordance with the perversity of things, and
something in the nature of calamity that he had not been ours one year,
when there came over me a dreadful but overmastering aversion from
killing those birds and creatures of which he was so fond as soon as they
were dead. And so I never knew him as a sportsman; for during that first
year he was only an unbroken puppy, tied to my waist for fear of
accidents, and carefully pulling me off every shot. They tell me he
developed a lovely nose and perfect mouth, large enough to hold gingerly
the biggest hare. I well believe it, remembering the qualities of his
mother, whose character, however, in stability he far surpassed. But, as
he grew every year more devoted to dead grouse and birds and rabbits, I