Noctes Ambrosianae Author:John Wilson 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: (OCTOBEK 1825.) North. Let us have some sensible conversation, Timothy. At our time of life such colloquy is becoming. Tickler. Why the devil would you not... more » come to Dalnacar- doch?1 Glorious guffawing all night, and immeasurable murder all day. Twenty-seven brace of birds, nine hares, three roes, and a red deer, stained the heather on the Twelfth, beneath my single-barrelled Joe—not to mention a pair of patriarchal ravens, and the Loch-Ericht eagle, whose leg was broken by the Prince when hiding in the moor of Eannoch. North. Why kill the royal bird? Tickler. In self defence. It bore down upon Saucho like a sunbeam from its eyrie on the cliff of Snows, and it would have broken his back with one stroke of its wing, had I not sent a ball right through its heart. It went up, with a yell, a hundred fathom into the clear blue air; and then, striking a green knoll in the midst of the heather, bounded down the rocky hill-side, and went shivering and whizzing along the black surface of a tarn, till it lay motionless in a huge heap among the water-lilies. North. Lost? Tickler. I stripped instanter—six feet four and three quarters m puris naturalibus—and out-Byroning Byron, shot, in twenty seconds, a furlong across the Fresh. Grasping the bird of Jove in my right, with my left I rowed my airy state towards the spot where I had left my breeches and other habiliments. Espying a trimmer, I seized it in my mouth, and on relanding at a small natural pier, as I hope to be shaved, lo ! a pike of twenty-pound standing, with a jaw like an alligator, 1 A shooting quarter in the highlands of Perthshire, occupied in the summer of 1825 by some friends of Professor Wilson. 48 SPORT AT DALNACARDOCH. and reaching from my hip to my instep, smote the heather, like a flail, into a sh...« less