76 GAMEKEEPERS AND GILLIES 



gillies were suppressed. Scrope was one of the few 

 Englishmen I had almost said the only Englishman 

 who could repeat conversation in northern dialect without 

 making it ridiculous. His most sparkling pages are those 

 which give the ipsissima verba of the hill men, Peter 

 Fraser, Sandy Mackintosh, and the rest, and of the men 

 of the river, Charlie and Tom Purdie, and Wattie of 

 Melrose. 



Gray, indeed, and monotonous would be the angling 

 annals of storied Tweedside but for the memories of the 

 Purdies, the Kersses, Rob o' the Trows, and others, their 

 successors, whom we, later-born, have known. One has 

 chafed under their tyranny, resented their dogma, smiled 

 at their foibles, yet withal how empty the scene would be 

 were they absent, how void and vapid the sport without 

 their eager comment. 



And so to-day, instead of recounting any of my own 

 feats or failures by flood or fell, I am going to dive into 

 the past and recover some recollections of a few of the 

 good fellows who have worked so hard to provide me with 

 sport. 



The first dive shall be a deep one, into the far-off days 

 of boyhood, when my very first preceptor in the rudi- 

 ments of shooting and angling was John Pace. Of all the 

 characters with which I have become intimate in any rank 

 of life, John's was one of the cleanest and most sincere. 

 Of English parentage his father was a Staffordshire 

 gamekeeper John served all his life in the north, and 

 became more Scottish than any Scot. His first place as 

 underkeeper was at Blantyre, whence he was promoted to 

 Sir Michael Shaw Stewart's fine territory of Ardgowan. 

 This was in the 'thirties, a period when driving grouse or 



