SOME EARLY EXPERIENCES 35 



P. D. Malloch saved my life by pulling me out of 

 a drain into which I had fallen up to my neck. 

 When we had concluded our hunt we repaired to 

 Newburgh, where I borrowed a suit of evening 

 clothes from the landlord of the inn, and in this 

 choice outfit, many sizes too large, and a pair of 

 carpet slippers, I went to the local bootmaker to 

 buy a pair of shoes. In my hands I held my dis- 

 carded garments, a mass of congealed mud, which 

 provoked the question, " Are you working in the 

 drains about here ? ): So nowadays, if I should 

 appear in my best clothes before him, Malloch 

 always says, " Are you working in the drains 

 about here ? " 



Men as a rule, and sportsmen in particular, are 

 apt to gauge respective dangers in sport according 

 to their personal experience, and it is a commonly 

 accepted idea that big-game hunting, especially 

 the chase of the lion, the buffalo and the elephant, 

 is the most dangerous of all forms of the sport. 

 Personally I am inclined to doubt it, and should 

 say that wild-fowling in a punt in the northern 

 firths is almost equally, if not quite, as easy a 

 method of losing one's life. 1 English and Irish 

 waters are comparatively safe, but in the northern 

 firths the wild-fowler will often be caught in sudden 

 squalls when off poling ground, and then nothing 

 but skill and luck can save him. In the course of 



1 In proof of this I may state that out of four professional 

 puntsmen on the Moray between the years 1880-1890, two 

 were drowned and one completely crippled with rheumatism. 

 During the same period on the Forth there were four possibly 

 more gunners above Blackness. Two of these also met their 

 death by drowning, one of them being swamped just below the 

 ramparts of Blackness Castle, where I was staying in 1887. 



