GLASGOW TO CAPELLIE. 21 



the only artificial training they got.* Gilbertfield 

 or 'Hhe clog with the rough beard/^ was still the one 

 to which, in coursing phrase, !Mr. A. Graham always 

 "belonged'^; and it was on his great rival Major 

 that he wrote the epitaph, at Lord Eglinton^s re- 

 quest, ^' Major quo non Mrjor.'' They ran in the 

 same thirteen public prizes, and each of them 

 won six. Gilbertfield was a very fast turner 

 going down-hill, and, as is the manner of rough- 

 haired dogs, closed with his hare at the fences. His 

 son Stewartfield was a finer dog to look at, and rough 

 like himself, and he never had an opponent more 

 worthy of him than Mr. Geddes^s " Go," who made 

 with Glory, one rough and the other smooth, the 

 fastest dog and bitch brace in any Scottish kennel. 

 Their owner was as good a courser as he was a shot. 

 He always wore a shawl handkerchief, vvhite bird^s- 

 eye on a green ground, and walked all day wet-shod 

 with a pair of low thin shoes. 



To a Lowlander the spots where great coursing 

 cups have been run off are invested with as deep a 



* " Sandy was in the Graham family at Limekilns-House, in Lanarkshii-e 

 for the last sixty years of his life, teaching boy afier boy of them to fishj shoot, 

 and ciu-1 — a model of uni^ladgred temperance, tea his beverage and a CremonA 

 his evening companion. In Scotch reel-playing he handled his bow after the 

 manner of his instructor, Neil Gow, so as to enchant the late Duke of Hamil- 

 ton, then Marquis of Douglas, who was the best reel-dancer of the North, and 

 at whose request it was that the old man's figiu'e and broad-brim were im- 

 mortalized in the Caledonian Coursing Picture. A great hiimorLst, full of 

 anecdote, and an utterer of no end of shrewd sayings or maxims — such as, 

 "Maister Alexander, whatever you lose in the dancing be sui-e to make up in 

 the turnm' aboot" — he would have been worth thousands to the Great Un- 

 kno^vn as the backbone of a novel. And then the world would have been 

 fascinated with descriptions of coursing such as the graphic one of fox- 

 hunting by Dr. Chalmers in his sermon on " Cruelty to Animals," wherein he 

 defended the sporting spuit of "the assembled cliivalry of half a county." 

 — A.G. 



