248 RIFLE AND ROMANCE 



pleasant month 1 spent at Alt-na-skiach : the excellent 

 rough shooting, the autumn salmon-fishing, or those 

 pleasant trips in the launch about that gloriously pictur- 

 esque western coast so deeply bitten into by the wild 

 Atlantic booming close outside ; a time to which I look 

 back with the greatest pleasure and affection, brightened 

 as it was by daily contact with one who possessed to an 

 unusual degree a charm of manner and personality that 

 seems characteristic of a somewhat bygone day. I became 

 much attached to old Mulligatawny. His death, a few 

 years since, came to me as a great shock. 



The Colonel's house was simply packed with trophies of 

 the chase, almost entirely those secured by him during a 

 lifetime of service spent in India. Here the somewhat 

 puny if handsome horns of the Scottish red deer, killed on 

 Alt-na-skiach itself, contrasted widely with the huge 

 rough and massive beam of the Indian sambar ; there the 

 ponderous head of a buffalo or bison looked down on a 

 case of local sea-birds. But the most notable feature of 

 the whole collection was the enormously large proportion 

 of tiger-skins and tiger-rugs set on the walls, laid on the 

 floor, or flung luxuriously over the furniture, and the 

 tigers' heads set up and grinning ferociously from glass 

 cases ; while two rows of long shelves in the museum were 

 entirely given up to an array of bleached tiger-skulls of 

 unusual size. 



I had often remarked on this redundancy of tigers, and 

 old Mulligatawny would reply, " My dear boy, these are 

 only the few that I have kept by me of a very much larger 

 collection that I brought home on retirement." 



"But what an enormous number of tigers you must 

 have bagged ! " I insisted, eager to profit by his large 

 experience. " And how did you do it ? You must have 

 had very unusual opportunities, or marvellously good 

 methods " 



But it was always at this point that the Colonel became 



