yllshire, 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 no 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 as 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 around 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 thinks
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 smoki