EDITOR'S PREFACE 



amending the orthography of a few place-names which St 

 John, having no GaeHc, wrote phonetically, thereby some- 

 times obscuring the meaning; second, by purging it of the 

 solecism "Sutherlandshire," which it is strange that he 

 should have followed other Englishmen in committing. 

 As well might one write of Northumberlandshire or 

 Sussexshire! 



The naturalist-sportsman is more commonly to be met 

 now than in the middle of the nineteenth century; more- 

 over, he is more prone than of yore to write about what he 

 has seen and done. Concurrently, a marked change has 

 come over the character of sport, divesting it of its wild 

 character, which is what St John most dearly prized. 



"I cannot say," he wrote, "that my taste leads me to rejoice in the 

 slaughter of a large bag of grouse in one day. I have no ambition to see 

 my name in the country newspapers as having bagged my seventy brace 

 of grouse in a certain number of hours on such and such a hill. I have 

 much more satisfaction in killing a moderate quantity of birds in a wild 

 and varied range of hill with my single brace of dogs, and wandering in 

 any direction that fancy leads me, than in having my day's beat laid out 

 for me, with relays of dogs and keepers, and all the means of killing the 

 grouse on easy walking ground, where they are so numerous that one has 

 only to load and fire. In the latter case, I generally find myself straying 

 off" in pursuit of some teal or snipe, to the neglect of the grouse and the 

 disgust of the keeper, who may think his dignity compromised by attend- 

 ing a sportsman who returns with less than fifty brace." 



Seventy — fifty brace! What would St John's comment 

 have been on a certain noble lord's feat of killing 1,036 

 grouse to his own gun in a single day on 30th August 1 888.'' 

 Even so, they were wild bred birds, and the performance 

 was a notable one; it is more difficult to understand what 

 pleasure the guests of another noble lord can have derived 

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