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 did not pay. We pass frequent parties of rabbitters, and almost every man we meet carries a gun, and is followed by several dogs. The rabbit question is a burning one hereabouts. We are getting out of the country of rocks now, and the hills become more rounded, and are clad with a denser growth. The scenery is more distinctly pastoral and rural. Flax swamps increase, and we leave the snows and cataracts behind us.

Dunkeld is a sleepy-looking little hamlet. Its great four-square hotel is big enough for a popula-of [sic] ten times the number the town can muster. The curtainless windows look cheerless.

The coach is packed inside, and I share the box seat with a dandy, diminutive publican, who has made a snug little pile as a butcher, and has taken to the tap in his old age as a sort of genteel occupation for his declining years. The little man is possessed of a fine vein of humour, of the broad American kind, and some of his passing remarks on men and things are shrewd and witty withal. The other occupant of the box seat is a desperately drunken Irishman, who alternately wants to fight and embrace the ex-butcher. At the slightest remark he flares up in the most ferocious manner, evidently looking on me as a base and bloody Saxon, whose head he would like to punch. His muttered treason occasionally bursts out into a general commination, which includes everything English, from Gladstone down to the meanest powder-monkey of her Majesty's fleet. It is in vain we reason, expostulate, threaten, cajole. His