PERTHSHIRE. 205 



these plentiful but not immediately fatal injuries must 

 have been the fault of the high trajectory of the 

 single-barrel rifle of those days, and probably if 

 Mr. Scrope or his friends had been armed with 

 the modern weapon, there would seldom have been 

 any need to slip so many deerhounds. Times have 

 altered also in other respects since Mr. Scrope's day, 

 for I am quite certain there is not now living man 

 or boy, who, for fear of spoiling sport, would of his 

 own free will follow the example of Harry Lightfoot, 

 Scrope's novitiate friend who chose to take the hill 

 quite unarmed on the first day of his deerstalking 

 career. Mr. Scrope makes us envious by telling of 

 Atholl stags of twenty-four and up to twenty-seven 

 stone in weight, but except in one instance he does 

 not state whether this was clean weight, while when 

 he does mention the manner of weighing it was " as 

 the stag fell ; " for it is related how one of the Dukes 

 of Atholl killed a wood stag at Dunkeld which scaled 

 36 stone 6 lbs. before the gralloch. A few pages 

 later Mr. Scrope estimates this as amounting to 



