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shooting, and were it not that deer and grouse are preserved, and 

 •extensive manors reserved for them, the proprietors would have 

 -required to lay out tens instead of thousands of pounds among the poor 

 people. 



Through the means of the shooting and fishing the rate of wages in 

 the Highlands, during the past twenty or thirty years, has risen 50 to 

 100 per cent. 



To your moors, your mountains, your rivers, and your lakes are you, 

 •bonnie Scotland, indebted in a very much greater degree than I have 

 shown in this chapter. Your shootings and your fishings, located as 

 they are amidst the grandest and most beauteous scenery, cause to be 

 spent in the land of heather thousands upon thousands of pounds per 

 annum 7nore than I have figured up. 



The sports of the Highlands induce your wealthy lairds and landlords 

 to dwell for many months of the spring, summer, and autumn, in their 

 ancestral homes, and there mix among the tenantry. What these 

 territorial magnates expend within that time, particularly during the 

 grouse-shooting, must be counted only by thousands— a no small item 

 of which is the employment as cooks and housemaids hundreds of your 

 Highland lassies, for, with the exception of ladies' and children's maids, 

 female servants are not usually brought with the familu s from England. 

 Besides all this, to her Highland home in favoured Scotland goes our 

 gracious Queen oftener than she does to any of her many residences, 

 and spends thereat more time. 



To poor old Ireland our Queen has come but twice during the fifty- 

 iive years of her reign, and upon each visit spent less than a week 

 there I Perhaps her Majesty would have come oftener had we Irish 

 been as peaceable and law-abiding as are the canny Scotch ! Albeit, 

 had our Queen paid regular visits to Ireland she would have received 

 there as loyal receptions as have been accorded her in either Scotland 

 or England ; and who knows but her gracious presence would have had 

 a soothing influence upon the sympathetic and impressionable Irish ? 



An article appeared in Land and Water on December 24, 1892, which 

 seems so excellent in principle and detail, moreover it is written 

 upon the lines I have adopted for this book— i.^., the perpetuation of 

 our sports by adjustment of abuses — I shall therefore reproduce it. 



"The shooting tenant has become such a recognised institution both 

 in England and Scotland that it is as well that his position should be 

 ■clearly defined. Everyone who can, and many of those who cannot^ 

 afford it, rent shootings not merely for the sport of shooting, but 

 because it is the right thing to do, and as a rule these persons are 

 equally ignorant of the usages between country gentlemen and their 

 tenants, and of the legal rights of the shooting and farming tenant. It 

 is, we think, one of the most difficult situations a man can be placed in 

 to become the shooting tenant on a large estate ; nowhere will his tact 

 ■and temper suffer greater trials. Unless he gets on with the occupier 

 ■of the land, his sport will certainly suffer, and if he does get on with 



