GROUSE. 99 



the chequered landscape under the moonlight, the long gleam 

 of lights of sleeping towns whose names we can only guess 

 at as we fly over the faultless steel roadway, and then the 

 lurid flare of the furnaces down the vale of Trent. We have 

 had our hot coffee, and taken our cigarettes, and perhaps 

 " forty winks " in the folds of our thick ulsters, when dawn 

 comes in the east over the deep dells and stone walls of 

 Cumberland ; and classic Ridblesdale, that most fascinating 

 valley, holds us before the sun has melted a single dewdrop 

 or thawed the thin white frost that silvers the shadows. 

 What does it matter that we have lost a night's rest, and 

 that we are perchance somewhat travel- stained ? The Border 

 is at hand, and beyond it lie heather lands and those grouse 

 we have thought and dreamt of during weary days at work 

 and the dusty crabbed hours of endless sessions. To-night 

 we shall be amongst the hills, and to-morrow we shall breathe 

 again air that is worth inspiring, and look upon scenes that 

 are a tonic and a sedative a very lethe of happiness to 

 a hack of dusty civilization. 



In fact, grouse shooting has a special charm of its own. 

 It can never cease to be popular in one sense of the word ; 

 while regarding its accessibility to any but the wealthy it 

 must be confessed that the recreation and all delights it 

 brings with it seem to be going back into the regions of the 

 impossible. 



There was a time, and not so very long ago, when a tract 

 . of moorland reasonably stocked with its own natural grown 

 birds could be had, if not actually for the asking, for about 

 the price of a week's shooting in the southern shires to-day. 

 There was more adventure and more sport, I think, under 

 those circumstances, and decidedly more of roughing ifc in 

 the style of which Scrope speaks so enthusiastically. It 

 was a tour of many changes, from mail-coach to dog-cart, 

 and trap to pony, at those times, to reach outlying moors ; 

 the shooter and his friends provisioning themselves for 

 a siege, moreover, like Border, raiders when the Wardens of 



