THE BRITISH ISLES 373 



or better off? It was only the other day that I went to Ireland, and 

 ten years had elapsed since I w^as last there. I can only say I was 

 pained and grieved. Fields lay out of cultivation; gates hung anyhow 

 (and so did men's clothes) ; a shock-headed, good-natured people 

 wandered apparently aimlessly about, and eyed me open-mouthed. 

 The keeper told me that ducks and snipe, and every kind of game, 

 were fast disappearing. 



And when I compared these poor people with the well-to-do 

 farmer and the sturdy labourer, clad in his native tweed, in my own 

 native county of Aberdeenshire, I could not help concluding that their 

 wilful extermination of animal life had much to do with it. 1 here is 

 still left in Ireland one deer forest, that of Muckross, near Killarney, 

 and here dwell the finest stags to be found, outside a park, in the 

 British Isles. 



There exists in all the wooded districts of Scotland a certain 



sprinkling of roedeer, but not in anything like the quantities that 



appear to be found in Austria and Hungary, In 



Roedeer. 

 Scotland they are regarded rather as a pest, inasmuch 



as they destroy so much of the crops, nor are they, but in very rare 

 instances, stalked and, in my opinion, shot in a proper fashion. The 

 late Sir Victor Brook had a marvellous knowledge of the habits of 

 the roedeer, and he would go out at the first break of dawn and 

 know by some strange instinct whether, and in what glade, the roe- 

 deer would probably be found taking his morning breakfast. He 

 shot them with a rifle, but forty out of fifty roedeer that are shot in 

 the woods of Scotland are blown over by a fowling-piece. This is, 

 to my mind, a horrible way of destroying a beautiful animal that, if 



