We are going to stay here at least a week.  We shall not try to do everything that can be done on Scottish soil, for we shall not stalk stags or shoot grouse; and I have told Jone that he may put on as many Scotch bonnets and plaids as he likes, but there is one thing he is not going to do, and that is to go bare-kneed, to which he answered, he would never do that unless he could dip his knees into weak coffee so that they would be the same color as his face.

There is a nice inn here with beautiful scenery all around, and the lovely Loch Rannoch stretches away for eleven miles.  Everything is just as Scotch as it can be.  Even the English people who come here put on knickerbockers and bonnets.  I have never been anywhere else where it is considered the correct thing to dress like the natives, and I will say here that it is very few of the natives that wear kilts.  That sort of thing seems to be given up to the fancy Highlanders.

Nearly all the talk at the inn is about, shooting and fishing.  Stag-hunting here is very different from what it is in England in more ways than one.  In the first place, stags are not hunted with horses and hounds.  In the second place, the sport is not free.  A gentleman here told Jone that if a man wanted to shoot a stag on these moors it would cost him one rifle cartridge and six five pound notes; and when Jone did not understand what that meant, the man went on and told him about how the deer-stalking was carried on here.  He said that some of the big proprietors up here owned as much as ninety thousand acres of moorland, and they let it out mostly to English people for hunting and fishing.  And if it is stag-hunting the tenant wants, the price he pays is regulated by the number of stags he has the privilege of shooting.  Each stag he is allowed to kill costs him thirty pounds.  So if he wants the pleasure of shooting thirty stags in the season, his rent will be nine hundred pounds.  This he pays for the stag-shooting, but some kind of a house and about ten thousand acres are thrown in, which he has a perfect right to sit down on and rest himself on, but he can’t shoot a grouse on it unless he pays extra for that.  And, what is more, if he happens to be a bad shot, or breaks his leg and has to stay in the house, and doesn’t shoot his thirty stags, he has got to pay for them all the same.

When Jone told me all this, I said I thought a hundred and fifty dollars a pretty high price to pay for the right to shoot one deer.  But Jone said I didn’t consider all the rest the man got.  In the first place, he had the right to get up very early in the morning, in the gloom and drizzle, and to trudge through the slop and the heather until he got far away from the neighborhood of any human being, and then he could go up on some high piece of ground and take a spyglass and search the whole country round for a stag.  When he saw one way off in the distance snuffing the morning air, or hunting for his breakfast among the