The kail grows brittle from the snow in my dank and cheerless garden. A crust ofbread gathers timid pheasants round me. The robins, I see, have made thecoalhouse their home. Waster Lunny's dog never barks without rousing my sluggishcat to a joyful response. It is Dutch courage with the birds and beasts of the glen, hard driven for food; but I look attentively for them in these long forenoons, andthey have begun to regard me as one of themselves. My breath freezes, despite mypipe, as I peer from the door; and with a fortnight-old newspaper I retire to theingle-nook. The friendliest thing I have seen to-day is the well-smoked hamsuspended from my kitchen rafters. It was a gift from the farm of Tullin, with a loadof peats, the day before the snow began to fall. I doubt if I have seen a cart since.This afternoon I was the not altogether passive spectator of a curious scene innatural history. My feet encased in stout "tackety" boots, I had waded down two ofWaster Lunny's fields to the glen burn: in summer the never-failing larder fromwhich, with wriggling worm or garish fly, I can any morning whip a savourybreakfast; in the winter-time the only thing in the valley that defies the ice-king'schloroform. I watched the water twisting black and solemn through the snow, theragged ice on its edge proof of the toughness of the struggle with the frost, fromwhich it has, after all, crept only half victorious. A bare wild rosebush on the furtherbank was violently agitated, and then there ran from its root a black-headed ratwith wings. Such was the general effect. I was not less interested when my startledeyes divided this phenomenon into its component parts, and recognized in thedisturbance on the opposite bank only another fierce struggle among the hungryanimals for existence: they need no professor to teach them the doctrine of thesurvival of the fittest. A weasel had gripped a water-hen (whit-rit and beltie theyare called in these parts) cowering at the root of the rose-bush, and was beingdragged down the bank by the terrified bird, which made for the water as its onlychance of escape. In less disadvantageous circumstances the weasel would havemade short work of his victim; but as he only had the bird by the tail, the prospectsof the combatants were equalized. It was the tug-of-war being played with a life asthe stakes. "If I do not reach the water," was the argument that went on in theheaving little breast of the one, "I am a dead bird." "If this water-hen," reasoned theother, "reaches the burn, my supper vanishes with her." Down the sloping bank thehen had distinctly the best of it, but after that came a yard of level snow, and hereshe tugged and screamed in vain. I had so far been an unobserved spectator; but mysympathies were with the beltie, and, thinking it high time to interfere, I jumpedinto the water