it lies to the north you may have to start by going due south,--not for a few hundred yards to get round a lochan, but perhaps for a couple of miles, for the sea is all round you. You are on what is in reality an island, and in getting off it, by a stony natural track or a wade through soft grey mud beloved of widgeon, you only get on to another island. The sea runs up narrow channels, and then opens out into a loch. At low tide, except for lines of seaweed here and there, you might be tempted to drink at such a place. At low tide no salt water gets into these lochans, at high tide it fills them, and there is one place, and one place only, where you can win across.

When this obstacle to progress has been overcome, another presents itself. The place is like a maze, and the ground the dry ground, or what there is of it is very rough. It looks level, but it is in reality the roughest and most tiring country to walk over we have ever seen. Everything must be carried on men's backs. No comfortable fat pony can follow you here, with cartridges and coats and lunch: the surest-footed and most experienced pannier pony in the Highlands would be of no use at all. In hot weather this is a drawback to shooting, for there is no drinking-water in all this region - no springs; and the loch-water, even where the sea cannot get at it, is brackish and disagreeable. The ground is soft, and after rain very wet and exceedingly

broken up, and your progress is made by a series of jumps over jumpable places and scrambles over deeper obstacles. This description of what is really a very fascinating district, though it perhaps hardly sounds so from what we have related of it, does not, of course, apply to anything but the flat lands. On some of the islands there are fine bold - peaked mountains, which often look higher than they really are, owing to their rising so directly from the sea-level.

There are many good sportsmen, counting the cartridges they fire each year by the thousand, who have never shot a wild goose-perhaps never seen one, unless high up in the heavens, working his clamorous way south or west in the autumn, or north in the spring. It was once the fortune of the present writer-a rare fortune it was, and little likely to be repeated-to find himself, on a wild December afternoon, standing-in a heaped-up position, it is true, but still on his legs-on a perfectly level, bare, mud flat, within fifty yards of probably a thousand brent geese. All day he had been watching them from behind dykes and rushes and knolls on the shore of the Cromarty Firth, and when the short day began to wane he had reluctantly to make up his mind that it was impossible to do anything with them, and that it would be well for him to start on his long tramp home, gooseless. The tide was running out, and the geese were left sitting in a dense phalanx on a sort of mud island. The

wind was blowing almost a hurricane. The landowners and foresters of Easter Ross had good cause to remember that particular afternoon, for their trees fell before it, not only by thousands but by square miles. More out of curiosity than anything else for who ever heard of any one walking up to wild geese in the open?-the man climbed over the dyke, and waded slowly through the shallow water towards the black mass of birds, the salt spray from the pools covering him thickly as he advanced the wind blowing in such a fashion that its pressure on the body caused a kind of suffocation; and he will never forget his feelings when, after struggling on for four or five hundred yards, he found himself within gunshot of the brent. Of course they saw him the moment he crossed the dyke a thousand eyes were looking at him; but they were afraid to rise, their sagacity for once deserting them. They must have thought it was better to face the approach of this stumbling biped than to get on the wing in the teeth of the great hurricane. They had to get up at last. Something like a couple of ton of geese strove to rise against the wind, then were blown in a confused struggling mass over the man's head, and he got five with his small gun.

Occasionally we picked up a brent. Long and patient watching and much exposure gave us once in a while a reward; but the rewards were very few, and the exertions

And now, after the lapse of years, in this December and January 1898 and 1899, we found ourselves among the Hebridean islands, once again in the home of the geese. From the room where we write this we can often see on a clear day with a glass a hundred bernicle and a score of the great grey lag at the same time, whilst brent are only hid from us by the line of low sandhills which keep out the sea. But, as the keeper often remarks as he shuts up the glass, "I spy them, but the thing is to get them into the bag." The day after we reached the lodge we made an expedition seaward in search of geese. For this sort of work each man wants a big gun-preferably an 8-bore as well as a 12-bore. There was a heavy sea running: we could see miles outside the breakers coming in, rising up over isolated rocks, and hiding them for long intervals with far-flying white water. But But our course was a wellprotected one, and we ran out four or five miles merrily enough under the big brown sail. We had been much amused by a little comedy which had been enacted at the tiny village where we got the boat. We were late-there were many things to see to the first day

and keen and impatient to be off. But a council was held at the door of the chief man's house which did not admit of hurrying. Two old men and two young men took part in

natural, and cared nothing for us. When snipe - shooting the next day with a setter, we were several times within easy distance of these grey-backed depredators, and it was amusing, and almost provoking, to see them flapping unconcernedly away. "We don't bother about them at this time of the year," said the keeper; "they are mostly strangers from other islands, and don't do any harm now."

As the sea, in the flats just described, fights with and creeps into the land, so here the land fights, but in a less effective fashion, with the sea. The coast is dotted with hundreds, probably without any exaggeration it may be said with thousands, of islands from sharp jagged rocks which just give footing to the cormorants, to green patches which will only feed one sheep or a couple of geese; and from these again to others which are a mile or a dozen of miles round. The navigation in and about these skerries is most intricate, and for the first day or two you soon become bewildered on the sea, just as you were before on the land, and lose all marks, and are constantly wondering which way you came, and whereabouts is the north. The tide flows strongly past them and round them, and it was very difficult for us to tell, when we were running before the wind, whether the brown mass of heaving seaweed was concealing treacherous rocks, or would give a safe passage to the boat. But the men knew the difficult coast intimately:

We

this was their play-ground and their work-ground, and day or night made little odds to them. Each little cove and rock and narrow passage was familiar to them, and all the turns and twists of the tides; and with Columbus steering and holding the sheet in his hand, we never felt any uneasiness, even when the boat heeled over to the fresh north wind, and no passage appeared to our uneducated eyes to lie through the rocks towards which we so swiftly ran. landed on a green island-green with rich long grass all above high-water mark, and purple and brown and yellow with rock and seaweed below it where we had seen some geese settle; but they had taken up a perfectly inaccessible position for our purpose, and no stalking, however careful, could get us within a shot of them. it was arranged to move them, and it fell to the lot of the narrator to take up his position with one of the men and his two guns at a certain point, while the others sailed round the island to put them up. Driving, carried on in this fashion, is always uncertain work; and here it may be said that unless the man who makes the arrangements knows his work and has studied the habits of the birds, getting a shot would always be a fluke of the largest kind. So it was with no very great expectations that we hid behind a knoll and waited. Half an hour passed and nothing came: they must be off some other way, we agreed, and the boat will be coming round the point soon. But they were

So

not off. Suddenly, "The geese! the gecse!" cried the gillie, and round the corner of the land, and coming right at us, were five of the bernicle. They came almost over our heads, and gave a quite possible though high shot. We had barely time to get the big gun cocked-a hammerless 8-bore would be invaluable for this sort of work - when they were upon us, and the charge of No. 1 and the slugs with which it was loaded delivered themselves harmlessly in the air,—at least that is our opinion, though Angus declared one was hit. To tell the truth, a bunch of geese coming past are not such easy birds to hit as might be thought. Their size is deceiving; they always appear to be nearer than they really are; and their pace is deceiving, as many a man has found out who has fired, as he thought, well in front of a leading bird, and seen the second or third in the line fall. Very, very provoking are these birds sometimes it is when you least expect them that you have them oftenest within shot. After a long day spent in this particular country, one of our party set off to walk on in advance of the trap. He deliberated whether to carry his gun with him or not, and decided not to burden himself with it. Two miles farther on five or six of the wary grey lags flew over his head within twenty yards, -so close that he could have killed one with a charge of small shot. When out after ducks a day rarely passed without a sudden cry of "Geese!

geese!" and a dropping of each member of the party into the hole nearest to him.

In the middle of a dreary waste of moor- using the adjective only in its conventional sense, for the place was never dreary to us-separated by miles of peat and water from any other habitations of men, stands a little beehive-looking cottage, in which lives, of all people in the world, a tailor. This roof stands up for a long time as a landmark to you, slowly crossing the moor. It is four miles in a direct line from the nearest hamlet; but you have to travel nearly eight over the seemingly level but really most broken up country before you reach it-by devious sea-paths, slippery with seaweed, or greasy with mud— round lochans and tarns-jumping in and out of crumbling peat - ditches, a most trying mode of progression to a tired man. Why a tailor should have settled in such a place was a constant mystery to us. "He had lived there always," was the only reason given us. there he was, with his "goose and his little red account-book, diligently stitching away before the tiny window. Good cloth of every pretty shade and pattern can be bought in the district for 3s. a-yard. The wool from off the native sheep, dyed by the natural dyes, is spun by women and girls in every house almost, and woven, chiefly also by women, in many parts of the island. Eight yards will make a suit for a man, and if he takes it to the tailor living in the waste, with buttons and braid and thread and lining, that

But