I love not to leave Gowrie and Julia so long, and yet they are very happy without me. Doubtless they could do without Mr. Rhind either, as he sits there in the window of the old-fashioned inn, with its deep bay and its small lozenges of glass, and its heavy frame of lead and iron. Julia looks up at Gowrie, and smiles, and his eyes glance cheerfully. There must be some jest between them, light and happy, with none of the world's bitterness--the jest of two lovers' hearts. Would that I knew what it is; but the words are spoken in a whisper, for Mr. Rhind is there with his everlasting little volume bound in vellum, and I may as well leave them at Berwick, too, and go on before, to see what reception was preparing for them in a distant place.
I must convey the reader with me to the old royal palace of Falkland, without, however, giving any detailed account of a building, a much better description of which than any I can afford may be found in many an antiquarian record. Suffice it that it was large, roomy, and then in a high state of preservation. It was also surrounded by an extensive deer-park, called "The Wood of Falkland," which was perhaps its highest attraction in the eyes of King James VI., whose only virtue was the love of hunting.
The season, as every reader, whether skilled in woodcraft or not, must know, was not one in which St. Hubert permits the horned tenants of the forest to be chased by man, for it was as yet but the month of February. But that season of the year was a dull one for the Scottish monarch; and after being deprived of his favourite pastime, he sometimes found the exercise even of his "Kingcraft," as he termed the art of government, so tedious as to require relief, and the labours of learned dullness, in which at other times he indulged, very wearisome.
When this was the case, he would often retire for a day or two, either to Falkland or to Stirling, with a few chosen attendants or companions, to see how his "_beasties_" were going on, or rather to revive the memories of the sport in which he delighted, by the sight of gray woods in their winter bareness, and of the antlered objects of his pursuit stalking about familiarly through the glades at a period when they knew, by experience or tradition, they were free from the hostility of men and dogs. The king had that sort of tender admiration for the objects of his sanguinary pursuit, that strange mixture of affection and cruelty, which is not uncommon in the human tiger throughout the world. The libertine, with the creature of his pleasure, whom he chases but to destroy, affords merely a modification of the same selfishness, and no one could probably have entered into James's feelings more fully than good old Buffon himself, who begins his description of the stag with the kindly words, "Voici l'un de ces animaux innocents, doux et tranquilles, qui ne semblent être faits que pour embellir, animer la solitude des forêts, et occuper loin de nous les retraites paisibles de ces jardins de la nature;" and then he gives an account of the best and most approved means of tearing it to pieces.