IN SCOTCH DEER-FORESTS 91 



are recorded for what they are worth, to beguile, 

 perchance, some leisure moments of others who 

 possess like tastes and have doubtless enjoyed similar 

 experiences. 



We live, no doubt, in a democratic, strenuous, and 

 commercial age an age of grandf atherly legislation 

 and of occasional Deer-forest Commissions, and such 

 like. There are, perhaps, certain quarters in which 

 deer-stalking and kindred sports are looked upon as 

 a species of social and political crime. ' Overfed 

 aristocrats or plutocrats devastate whole provinces 

 of country suitable for prosperous sheep-farms, in 

 order to preserve and then slaughter tame deer for 

 the satisfaction of their brutal and bloodthirsty in- 

 stincts/ This is, in effect, the way in which the case 

 might possibly be put by some whose knowledge of 

 the subject is neither practical nor extensive. But 

 I am not concerned, here at all events, either to 

 answer these views or to defend deer-stalkers in 

 general or myself in particular. Sportsmen can well 

 be trusted, as a class, to look after themselves and 

 their own pursuits. 



So far, however, as the ' obese plutocrat ' is con- 

 cerned, the feelings of the most vindictive sportsman 

 would be amply satisfied by a sentence condemning 

 the members of, say, a Radical Deer-forest Commis- 

 sion to live for a month on the produce of their own 

 unaided rifles from a Highland deer-forest. In very 

 truth the sentence would be too severe, and even 

 inhuman ; for in all probability, if strictly enforced, 

 it would entail starvation on those on whom it might 

 be passed. 



I have not the slightest doubt that we who delight 

 to satisfy our inherited, possibly primitive, but dis- 

 tinctly healthy, predatory instincts in the chase, will 



