Finally—­for human nature is but human nature after all; he had been thinking of others so far, and he was now entitled to consider himself a little—­he thought he would go along to Mr. Macleay’s.  When he arrived at the shop, he glanced in at the windows; but among the wild-cats, ptarmigan, black game, mallards, and what not, there was nothing to arrest his attention; it was a stag’s head he had in his mind.  He went inside, and his first sensation was one of absolute bewilderment.  This crowded museum of birds, beasts, and fish—­skarts, goosanders, sand-grouse, terns, eagles, ospreys, squirrels, foxes, big-snouted trout, harts, hinds, bucks, does, owls, kestrels, falcons, merlins, and every variety of the common gull shot by the all-pervading Cockney—­staring, stuffed, silent, they were a confusion to the eyes, and nowhere could he find his own, his particular, his precious stag.  Alas! when Mr. Macleay was so kind as to take him behind into the workshop—­which resembled a huge shambles, almost—­and when, from among the vast number of heads and horns lying and hanging everywhere around, the Strathaivron head was at last produced, Lionel was horribly shocked and disappointed.  Was this, then, his trophy that he hoped to have hung up for the admiration of his friends and his own ecstatic contemplation—­this twisted, shapeless, sightless lump of hide and hair, with a great jaw of discolored teeth gleaming from under its flabby folds?  It is true that here were the identical horns, for had he not gone lovingly over every tine of them?—­but was this rag of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather?  However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him.  He was shown the various processes and stages of the taxidermist’s art, the amorphous mass of skin and hair gradually taking shape and substance until it stood forth in all its glory of flaming eye and proud nostril and branching antlers; and he was highly pleased to be told that this head he had got in Strathaivron was a fairly good one, as stags now go in the North.  So, all his shopping being done, he set off again for the Station Hotel, where he got what he wanted in the shape of dinner, followed by a long and meditative smoke in the billiard-room, with visions appearing among the curls of blue vapor.

What the Highland Railway manages to do with the trains which it despatches from Inverness at 10 P.M. and reproduces the next morning at Perth about 7, it is impossible for the mind of man to imagine; but it is not of much consequence so long as you are snugly ensconced in a sleeping-berth; and Lionel passed the night in profound oblivion.  With the new day, however, these unavailing and torturing regrets began again; for now he felt himself more completely than before shut off from the friends he had left; and Strathaivron and all its associations and pursuits had grown distant like a dream.  He was lucky enough, on this southward journey, to get a compartment to