88 GAMEKEEPERS AND GILLIES 



six feet high, well knit, with handsome features and a 

 truly commanding presence a very lord among other 

 gillies. To see him emerge from his low-browed, smoke- 

 stained hovel, such as any sanitary authority in the 

 south would have condemned as unfit for habitation, 

 gave rise to sundry reflections upon the vanity of building 

 regulations. 



Corresponding to Sandy's physical development was 

 his mental equipment. Politics and natural history were 

 his favourite subjects: one could discuss them as freely 

 with him as with an equal, though he had seldom been 

 out of his native wilds, and then only on brief visits to 

 some of the sportsmen who employed him on the river 

 or moor. What struck me as most unusual in one of 

 such restricted experience was the absence of prejudice 

 and of that intellectual rigidity which binds a man in- 

 vincibly to acquired or preconceived opinion. In talking 

 politics, for instance, he was not so eager to air his own 

 views as to learn the opinions of others upon subjects 

 in which he could hardly have been expected to take 

 much interest. ' I was bred a Liberal,' he said to me 

 one day, ' and in many things I 'm a Liberal yet ; but 

 what converted me to the Conservatives was Lord 

 Salisbury's foreign policy.' 



I first made Sandy's acquaintance many years ago. 

 He was waiting, when I arrived from the far south, at 

 Halkirk station on a bitter February noon to conduct me 

 to my beat on the Thurso. I was a stranger in those 

 parts, prepared neither with clothing nor by antici- 

 pation for the rigours of a Caithness winter. I gazed 

 shivering across the wild, bleak plain, where not a tree, 

 not even a bush, presented itself as shelter from the 



