232 "THE MOOR AND THE LOCH" 



heads and the haunches are seldom what they used 

 to be. 



Sixty years ago there was good rough shooting on 

 many a half-moorland estate that carries nothing now 

 but partridges and a hare or two. No doubt, had we 

 the good luck to be the laird, we might console our- 

 selves by a reference to the rent-roll. But not being 

 the laird, but merely his guest, we find few things more 

 depressing than revisiting one of the favourite shooting- 

 haunts of our youth in these days of accumulating 

 mortgagees and scientific farming. The yellow oats 

 are waving over the purple hillsides where the moorcock 

 used to crow so cheerily of an August morning. There 

 is a superb growth of swedes in the sunny hollow where 

 the black- game lay like stones among the bracken and 

 the cotton grass on that memorable Twentieth when we 

 made a massacre of the innocents. The bog has been 

 drained where we used to spring the snipe, as we threaded 

 our way among the weed-covered moss-pots ; and the 

 old mill-pond has been dammed and embanked where 

 we flushed the wild-duck in the rushy back-water. It 

 is but poor compensation for the loss of that sensational 

 variety that we can half fill a capacious pannier with 

 partridges ; or that the covers where we went rabbit- 

 shooting, in season and out of season, are now strictly 

 preserved for the coop-fed pheasants. And, to leave 

 the land for the water, it is worse still with the fishing. 

 A downfall of rain in the droughts of summer used to 

 secure safe sport for many days to come. The super- 

 fluous moisture trickled slowly through myriads of tiny 



