IN THE HIGHLANDS 173 



used warm water or any such fine nonsense. His income 

 was about £3,000 a year. The shootings were not let 

 in his time, in the Highlands at least. Landlords then 

 were not so often hard up as now, when with three times 

 their income there is homoeopathic hospitality very 

 different indeed from the lavishness in his house. All 

 is now stored up for cutting a splash in London or 

 abroad, just as a couple of big game battues in the 

 year replace the continuous moderate shooting through- 

 out the season which people formerly offered their 

 friends. 



" ' Father,' Frank would say, ' they tell me there is an 

 officer come to-day to the inn at Ceann-t-saile .' ' Frank, 

 run and find out his name,' was the reply. * Give him 

 my compliments, and say I hope he will come up at 

 once with his things and remain here till he is obliged 

 to leave.' The idea of a gentleman — ladies in those 

 days never inspected our country — being allowed to 

 remain at an inn was contrary to all rules of Highland 

 hospitality and thought disgraceful. The entertained 

 were not always angels unawares, but one day there 

 arrived Major Colby, of the Engineers, who, with a 

 sergeant and some privates, had been sent to the north- 

 west as pioneers of the Government plans for the 

 Ordnance Survey of Britain, a great work, hardly com- 

 pleted yet, though I must be writing of about the year 

 1816. My father caught many a fish on his hospitality 

 hook, but never one like Colby, a highly educated man 

 of science, from astronomy all the way downwards, full 

 of every kind of information, and most able and glad 

 to pass it on to others. He had been all through the 



