‘Don’t you call this a very ugly country?’ Silverbridge asked as soon as he arrived.  Now it is the case that the traveller who travels into Argyleshire, Perthshire, and Inverness, expects to find lovely scenery; and it was also true that the country through which they had passed for the last twenty miles had been not only bleak and barren, but uninteresting and ugly.  It was all rough open moorland, never rising into mountains, and graced by no running streams, by no forest scenery, almost by no foliage.  The lodge itself did indeed stand close upon a little river, and was reached by a bridge that crossed it; but there was nothing pretty either in the river or the bridge.  It was a placid black little streamlet, which in that portion of its course was hurried by no steepness, had not broken rocks in its bed, no trees on its low banks, and played none of those gambols which make running water beautiful.  The bridge was a simple low construction with a low parapet, carrying an ordinary roadway up to the hall door.  The lodge itself was as ugly a house could be, white, of two stories, with the door in the middle and windows on each side, with a slate roof, and without a tree near it.  It was in the middle of the shooting, and did not create a town round itself as do sumptuous mansions, to the great detriment of that seclusion which is favourable to game.  ‘Look at Killancodlem,’ Dobbes had been heard to say—­’a very fine house for ladies to flirt in; but if you find a deer within six miles of it I will eat him first and shoot him afterwards.’  There was a Spartan simplicity about Crummie-Toddie which pleased the Spartan mind of Reginald Dobbes.

‘Ugly do you call it?’

‘Infernally ugly,’ said Lord Gerald.

’What did you expect to find?  A big hotel, and a lot of cockneys.  If you come after grouse, you must come to what the grouse think pretty.’

‘Nevertheless, it is ugly,’ said Silverbridge, who did not choose to be ‘sat upon’.  ’I have been at shootings in Scotland before, and sometimes they are not ugly.  This I call beastly.’  Whereupon Reginald Dobbes turned upon his heel and walked away.

‘Can you shoot?’ he said afterwards to Lord Gerald.

‘I can fire off a gun, if you mean that,’ said Gerald.

‘You have never shot much?’

’Not what you call very much.  I’m not so old as you are, you know.  Everything must have a beginning.’  Mr Dobbes wished ’the beginning’ might have taken place elsewhere; but there had been some truth in the remark.

‘What on earth made you tell him crammers like that?’ asked Silverbridge, as the brothers sat together afterwards smoking on the wall of the bridge.

’Because he made an ass of himself; asking me whether I could shoot.’