of the Highland deer have occasionally witnessed
very startling battles. A humble housewife,
while busy with her usual occupations, overheard
one summer morning a dreadful stamping
and trampling near her cottage. Going to the
door she beheld two stags in mortal combat.
With a crash they came into collision, and the
weaker fell. Of course she shut herself into
her cottage, for she was all alone. The cottage
stood on a slope, and she could see out of her
window the stronger stag pushing the weaker
in his dying agonies down the brae. When her
husband came home she told him what she had
seen, and he went out and found the deer, one
dead, and the other fastened by the horns to the
horns of his victim. The victor had plunged one
of his dog antlers into the jugular vein of
his rival, and the horns had expanded to let him
do it, but had instantly closed again, interlocking
him inextricably and for ever, with the
vanquished. The heads of both the stags were
taken off, and with the interlaced antlers form
one of the greatest curiosities in the private
museum of a northern proprietor.

The forest of Gairloch was once the scene of
an equally memorable combat. Three foes met
there one day, at a very critical moment, an eagle,
a roe-deer, and a gamekeeper. The eagle pounced
upon the deer, plunging his talons into his neck,
whilst the deer bounded towards the lake which
was close by. The eagle to prevent the deer
from leaping into the water caught hold of the
stump of an old tree with one of his claws. But
such however was the strength of the roe that
the talon was left torn off in the stump, and
the foes struggled and fought in the lake. At
this moment the gamekeeper fired his rifle, and
with one bullet killed both the eagle and the roe.

A RACE WITH A NIGHTMARE.

Ching! Chang! That was St. Mary's clock.

Cling! Clang! (one note higher). That
was the St. Clement's clock.

CHANG—DOOOM! That was the great
Victoria Tower clock.

Ring a tingle ting. Ringatingletang, tingle ting
tang, and so on da capo. That was the blessed
chimes of St. Clement's again, staggering and
stumbling out that pleasant little Scotch tune of
"Corn rigs are bonny"—pleasant enough by
moonlight, on your way home from, say Drury
Lane Theatre, or the Olympic; but by no means
so pleasant when stammered over in a melancholy
and sulky style by reluctant hammers on rusty
belfry anvils in an old telescope tower, at two
o'clock in the morning, more especially when
there is a horrible racket going on in the third
floor chambers below.

Poor tired Mr. Ellis, the medical student
preparing for his examination, in the humble
fourth floor, would have given five guineas down
(if he had had them), we are quite sure, to have
been only allowed to roll once more and then fall
asleep, which he had been full three hours trying
unsuccessfully to do.

Mr. Robert Ellis, of No. Seven Lyons Inn,
was a hard-working student at St. Thomas's;
his honourable aim was simply to pass a first-
rate examination, master a sound stock of
professional knowledge, to go back to Bridport,
and commence practice in an unambitious way,
in order to assist his good old mother, who was
a widow with a small income. A fine fellow the
rough country student was, alert of brain, high
spirited, and full of a moral courage that
disdained all sneers at his quiet, methodical, and
perhaps rather hum-drum life. At times, it
must be allowed, glimpses of professional
greatness had set the student day-dreaming, as
students have dreamed before. He had pictured
himself called in to amputate the sultan's leg, or
to couch the pope for cataract; but till those
remarkable events took place Mr. Robert Ellis
worked on unswervingly to qualify himself for
the chief "medicine man" of the busy little
Dorsetshire town of Bridport, and was in a fair
way to success, if overwork did not injure his
health, and if Mr. Medlicot's unceasing nightly
revels on the third floor did not bring on a
nervous fever.

Mr. Fitzstephen Medlicot, the reveller in the
chambers below, was one of those dashing,
handsome men, whose antecedents no one
seems exactly to know, and whose profession
can never be clearly ascertained. They have no
known office, but still they seem to sell wine, and
to talk about corn or coals, and have generally
"a very curious old master," a fine but rather
dark picture, hanging up in their rooms for sale.
They bet a little on the turf, they play a good
deal at pool, and occasionally break out in the
Park with a smart phaeton and a very high-
actioned horse. They give card parties, and
generally seem to have a lavish flow of money
that comes from nowhere in particular. They
wear horse-shoe scarf-pins and white waistcoats
on the smallest provocation, are choice in their
cigars and wine, but still remain permanent
mysteries, till one day the City blazes with the
explosion of a vast accommodation-paper plot,
and Mr. Medlicot vanishes into "air, thin air;"
for has not the earth its bubbles "as the
water hath?" and he (Mr. Medlicot) was one
of them. If a year after you had dragged for
him in lower depths of London life, the net,
after several hauls among shoals of swindlers,
forgers, swell-mobsmen, and quack doctors,
would perhaps drag up Mr. Medlicot, still glossy
and flashy, but by this time transformed into
an hotel and lodging-house thief; for that
is the favourite step by which educated men
slide into crime. A year later he might turn
"dummy-hunter," a stealer of pocket-books,
or a bank thief, and so he would go on till the
hemp ripened for him, or the cell in Portland was
swept clean for his reception.

The cards go in strange sequences in London.
The knave may keep an apple-stall at
the king's gate, and a poor two of clubs live in
the cellar at the back of the very house of the
great king of diamonds himself. Sometimes,
indeed, the strange city seems to one's fancy