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.^ 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 



^ 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 stajdng in 1887. 



