t66 ifctncjs of tbe 1Rofc t Itiifle, an& 



grand physique, for she was a woman of stately beauty, 

 which was reproduced in a greater or less degree in all 

 her children. The boy was sent for his early education 

 to the old Manse of Mearns, and there, too, his sporting 

 instincts were stimulated. 



" There had been," he writes in the " Recreations," 

 " from time immemorial, it was understood, in the Manse, 

 a duck-gun of very great length, and a musket that, 

 according to an old tradition, had been out both in the 

 Fifteen and Forty-five. There were ten boys of us, 

 and we succeeded by rotation to gun or musket, each 

 boy retaining possession for a single day only ; but then 

 the shooting season continued all the year. They must 

 have been of admirable materials and workmanship, for 

 neither of them so much as once burst during the Seven 

 Years' War. The musket, who, we have often since 

 thought, must surely rather have been a blunderbuss in 

 disguise, was a perfect devil for kicking when she 

 received her discharge ; so much so indeed, that it was 

 reckoned creditable for the smaller boys not to be 

 knocked down by the recoil. She had a very wide 

 mouth, and was thought by us * an awful scatterer ' ; a 

 qualification which we considered of the very highest 

 merit. She carried anything we chose to put into her 

 balls, buttons, chucky-stanes, slugs or hail. She had 

 but two faults she had got addicted, probably in early 

 life, to one habit of burning priming, and to another of 

 hanging fire ; habits of which it was impossible, for us at 

 least, to break her by the most assiduous hammering of 

 many a new flint ; but such was the high place she 

 justly occupied in the affection and admiration of us all, 



