Quotation TWO
First then, of this Love’s Meinie of my own age, or under it, William Macdonald took to me; and got me to promise, that autumn, to come to him at Crossmount, where it was his evangelical duty to do some shooting in due season.
I went into Scotland by Dunbar; saw again Loch Leven, Glen Farg, Rose Terrace, and the Inch of Perth; and went on, pensive enough, by Killiecrankie, to the clump of pines which sheltered my friend’s lodge froif possible wim the four winds of the wilderness.
After once walking up Schehallion with him and his keepers, with such entertainment as I could find in the mewing and shrieking of some seventy or eighty grey hares, who were brought down in bags and given to the poorer tenantry; and forming final opinion that the poorer tenantry might better have been permitted to find the stock of their hare-soup for themselves, I forswore further fashionable amusement, and set myself, when the days were fine, to the laborious eradication of a crop of thistles, which had been too successfully grown by northern agriculture in one of the best bits of unboggy ground by the Tummel.
Wks. 35.425
I must return for a moment to the clumps of pine at Crossmount, and their company of owls, because—whatever wise people may say of them—I at least myself have found the owl’s cry always prophetic of mischief to me; and though I got wiser, as aforesaid, in my field of thistles, yet …
Wks. 35.428