e selfish portions of the holidays
none stand out more clearly in my memory than the August days when
partridge and grouse shooting used to open. Most of my shooting was
done over the delightful highlands around Bishop's Castle in
Shropshire, on the outskirts of the Welsh hills, in Clun Forest, and
on the heather-covered Longmynds. How I loved those days, and the
friends who made them possible--the sound of the beaters, the
intelligent setters and retrievers, the keepers in velveteens, the
lunches under the shade of the great hedges or in lovely cottages,
where the ladies used to meet us at midday, and every one used to
jolly you about not shooting straight, and you had to take refuge in a
thousand "ifs."

As one looks back on it all from Labrador, it breathes the aroma of an
old civilization and ancient customs. Much of the shooting was over
the old lands of the Walcotts of Walcott Hall, a family estate that
had been bought up by Earl Clive on his return from India, and was now
in the hands of his descendant, an old bachelor who shot very little,
riding from one good stand to another on a steady old pony. There
were many such estates, another close by being that of the Oakovers of
Oakover, a family that has since sold their heritage.

A thousand time-honoured old customs, only made acceptable by their
hoary age, added, and still continue to add in the pleasures of
memory, to the joys of those days, with which golf and tennis and all
the wonderful luxury of the modern summer hotel seem never able to
compete. It is right, however, that such eras should pass.

The beautiful forest of Savernake, that in my school days I had loved
so well, and which meant so much to us boys, spoke only too loudly of
the evil heirloom of the laws of entail. Spendthrift and dissolute
heirs had made it impossible for the land to be utilized for the
benefit of the people, and yet kept it in the hands of utterly
undeserving persons. Being of royal descent they still bore a royal
name even in my day; but it was told of them that the last, who had
been asked to withdraw from the school, on one occasion when, half
drunk, he was defending himself from the gibes and jeers of grooms and
'ostlers whom he had made his companions, rose with ill-assumed
dignity and with an oath declared that he was their king by divine
right if only he had his dues. Looking back it seems to me that the
germs of democratic tendencies were sown in me by just those very