pastime with which to spend the years between
twenty and thirty. This is one grand reason why
all gentlemen without a certain income of their
own—independent of what they require to
purchase their first commissions and subsequent
promotion—avoid the army, or else make up
their minds to soldier in the colonies all their
lives. Let any one watch the changes that take
place in a regiment ordered home from India,
and note what a number of officers exchange
into regiments which remain in that country.
Is it the love of Indian life that makes them do
this? Certainly not; it is their inability to
"keep up the pace" in the regiment at home.
If any poor man be lucky enough to be promoted
to a commission, even while still young and
active, he is obliged either to serve all his
days in the East, or to live apart from his
companions. The English army is at present
so constituted that it is a service solely for the
rich, and this is one reason why the class
we most want in our ranks enlist so rarely,
and why those who get over their ten years
in the ranks so rarely renew their engagements.
It is in quantity as well as quality,
too, that our recruiting is falling off. If
another such war as that of the Crimea were
to break out, or if an emergency like the Indian
mutiny of 1857 were to arise, we might have to
fill our ranks from amongst the inmates of our
jails and the ticket-of-leave men; so unpopular
has the service become, not only among artisans,
but among agricultural labourers.

There is no doubt that the English army
might be made as popular a service in England
as that of France is in France. But we have so
many "vested interests" to consider, and so
many people to conciliate, that we seldom or
never do the right thing at the right time. In
short, it is "un-English," or un-something else
equally intelligible, to change "the system, sir,
the system," and so the system lingers on.

IN THE LOWLANDS.

THERE is something very fascinating in the
sport of angling. I don't mean vulgar bottom fishing,
where "the fool at one end" merely drops his
line, and waits until the bob of the float warns him
that a foolish fish has swallowed the "worm at
the other." Not that kind of piscatorial art, which
any one can compass; but the graceful throwing
of the two hair casting line with the three barbed
flies floating from it—the art that is all grace
and delicate skill, and, as Izaak Walton hath
it, gentleness—the art which handles a fish
tenderly as if it loved him. I learned to cast a fly
when I was very young, and one of my oft-
recurring dreams in after-life, when far distant
from my native trout streams, was of myself, a
boy again, standing on a chair and taking down
a black hickory fishing-rod from over the dining-
room door at home. In my dream, I took down
the rod, put it together, adjusted the line and
hooks, and reached the banks of the Islay: but
always when I was on the point of casting the
line into a well-remembered stream, I awoke.
Through many years, I dreamt this dream over
and over again, and in my waking hours longed
to realise it—to fish in the Islay or the Deveron
once again.

At last my longing is about to be gratified.
Here flows the Deveron at my feet; and I am
going to relate a strange thing that happened to me.
I was not provided with a rod, and went forth to
buy one. There was not one for sale in all the
little town, but I was informed that a turner, in a
certain street, would probably lend me one. I
proceeded to the turner, and he lent me a rod. I
take the pieces out into his yard to put them
together, and, as I handle the slips of hickory, a
strange feeling steals over me, and I begin to
think that it cannot be reality—that I am
dreaming that dream again. I have put the
whole rod together, and my first vague impression
is confirmed past a doubt. It is my own old
rod, the one that rested over the dining-room
door at home, the one that I had taken down in my
dreams! It is more than twenty years since I
handled it, yet I know it by my sense of touch,
almost before I look at it, and notice my father's
initials on the handle. How it ever found its
way from the Islay to the Deveron, I did not
care to inquire; but here it was, to be my
companion once again after a long parting. I felt
that it had come on purpose to meet me, like a
dear old friend. Another odd circumstance:
the first gun I handle, is one I used when at
the university in Aberdeen, fifty miles distant
from the place where I now find it.

It is not a dream this time. I cast my line,
and find that I can cast as skilfully as ever; and
I have all the old sportsman's fire in my veins,
until suddenly I land a large trout. And now
the sight of the poor creature lying gasping on
the bank, with a cruel hook through its tongue,
reminds me that I have been living in towns. It
is not all wickedness, and hard-heartedness, and
indifference, that one learns in large cities. I
am struck with compunction for the tortures I
am inflicting on this innocent fish. It goes to
my heart to wrench that piece of barbed steel
from its mouth—I have almost a mind to throw
it into the water again, and give it its life.
Have I grown tender-hearted or effeminate?
So, when the bird falls at my feet, and I see
its dying eyes looking up at me reproachfully, I
feel as though some of the contents of that
deadly gun, were in my own breast. But man
soon relapses into barbarism. In a day or two
I have no feelings for the fish, and can dash their
brains out against my iron heel without
compunction: can even leave them to gasp out
their lives on the bank, doubtless in the agony
of what to them is drowning.

From this little town of Banff, which is the
basis of my holiday operations, I make excursions
into several districts of the Lowlands,
and see a good deal of rural as well as town
life. I do not see these places for the first time.
I passed my boyhood among them, and, visiting
them, after many years, with some powers of
observation and judgment to aid my early