228 "THE MOOR AND THE LOCH" 



and aesthetic point of view, many of these material 

 " improvements " must remain at least an open 

 question ; and looking at them as a sportsman, they 

 are simply deplorable. We have always inclined to 

 subscribe to the sweeping condemnation by St. John's 

 old Donald, when he missed the geese from the 

 Morayshire lochs and the snipe from the bogs, and 

 saw the semi-domesticated partridge steadily creeping 

 up on the grouse-ground. 



Not that there is unmingled melancholy in the 

 retrospect, and laudatores temporis acti as we may be, 

 we hope we regard with suitable gratitude the modern 

 inventions in firearms and sporting equipments. Sixty 

 years ago we fancy that the venerable flint-locked 

 single-barrel was still in fashion. The author of the 

 Oakleigh shooting code, writing many, many years 

 ago, concedes certain merits to that exploded weapon. 

 He says that it made steady and deadly shots, because 

 knowing that you had but a single chance, you were 

 constrained to dwell on your aim. Those flints and 

 single-barrels may have been sure, but they were 

 abominably slow. The woodcock would have dipped 

 under the bough and twisted away behind the tree- 

 trunks while your fingers were fumbling with the lock 

 and the charge was in course of kindling. The rabbit 

 jerking across the ride, or the grouse-cock topping the 

 crest of the brae, would have laughed at the beard of 

 the baffled shooter. No ; the single-barrel was em- 

 phatically the weapon of the old school, and, as a rule, 

 must have bred a race of potterers who would pre- 



