86 LEAVES FROM A GAME BOOK. 



keep afloat, was to turn on my back, draw the knees 

 as near to the chin as they would come, and with arms 

 fully extended, and mouth and nostrils but just clear 

 of the water, I found I could float a sufficient time to 

 let me paddle by degrees to shallow or bank. 



On the 10th August I arrived at Raehills, near 

 Beattock, for a lengthy stay with an old friend. Captain 

 John Hope Johnstone, Cholmondeley Pennell and Captain 

 Gordon Hughes making up the party. This year the 

 " twelfth " fell on a Sunday, and as the 13th and few 

 days following were very wet, we did not fairly get at 

 the grouse until the 17th, when, shooting the Lochan- 

 head beat, we brought home fifty and a half brace, while 

 on the 20th we had other forty-five brace, and on the 

 24th Pennell and I had a pretty mixed bag of eleven 

 grouse, four black-cocks, twenty snipe, two teal, a hare, 

 and a rabbit. In these happy quarters I stayed till the 

 22nd September, during which time we had twenty-four 

 days of sport, many of them very wet, which yielded us 

 7 fallow bucks, 603 grouse, 26 black-cocks, 59 snipe, 79 

 partridges, 13 hares, and 7 ducks, or 814 head. We 



