LEAVES FROM A GAME BOOK. 103 



which, if I remember rightly, was some eighteen hundred 

 feet above sea level — than we were overtaken by the 

 most violent thunderstorm it has ever been my lot 

 to witness. As the tempest reached us we hid our 

 guns in the heather, and, moving some distance away, 

 fell flat on our faces to watch with anxious eyes the 

 black clouds charged with electricity come rolling up 

 over the top of the hill we were on. The lightning 

 was so close to us that it did not seem to flash, as it 

 does when viewed from a distance, but the clouds 

 simply appeared to open with one great blaze of vivid 

 light, the report following the next second. The light- 

 ning twice ploughed up the peat close to us, while we 

 afterwards learnt that some sheep sheltering under a 

 rock not two hundred yards from where we crouched 

 were all killed. At the first abatement of the storm we 

 made a bolt in a bee-line for Elibank, glad to reach 

 it uninjured — a feeling which was accentuated when 

 in the evening we heard that Lord Lauderdale had 

 been killed by lightning some ten miles away, and I 

 have but little doubt that, had we been as rash as 



