the superintendent of the Forest. On June 3rd we went with him to a wood called Salisbury Trench, where he knew of a nest which his boy was watching till we came. A little way off the boy appeared and said the bird had just left the nest, which was about fifty feet up an oak tree. I went up and found a large nest lined with fresh green sprigs of beech with two eggs. Though it had been raining, the nest and eggs were dry, and I let them down in my handkerchief and packed them up. When we came to blow them that evening, though their size and shape were all right, the colour and strong smell of turpentine made us suspicious of foul play; but as Peckham knew of another nest we agreed to say nothing at present. The next day, after a very pleasant walk to the north end of the Forest, we came to another nest in an oak tree very difficult to climb. I went up, looking out as I went for signs of anyone having been before me, and whilst I was going up a honey buzzard which Godman saw very plainly flew round and lit on a tree close by. In this nest I found one egg which resembled the others in colour and smell. When I got down, I said to Peckham that the smell was very unusual. “Oh,” said he, "did you not know that it comes from the pine shoots which the birds eat?” In the evening, however, we met a man who knew the trick, and who told us that the genuine eggs were probably taken for a collector at Fordingbridge, and that Peckham had a bantam which laid round eggs of the same size and shape as the buzzard’s and that he coloured them by dipping them in a solution of ruddle, and fixing the colour with turpentine so that it would not come off. He did not profit by his fraud on this occasion, for when I told Mr. Cumberbatch of it he made the man give up a pair of the real eggs which I have now.
In 1867 I went to a grouse moor in Aberdeenshire which my father and Sir M. Hicks-Beach, who had married my sister, rented, but it was a bad year for grouse, and I never took another Scotch shooting until 1918, as it has always seemed to me that the attractions of big game shooting in wilder countries were much greater than those of Scotland. But I have had some very pleasant times in later years, especially in the forest of Glenavon, which Godman rented for a long period, and where I always enjoyed excellent sport. It seems to me, however, that deer stalking as now carried on is not really, as far as the sport goes, comparable with elk hunting in Norway, with chamois or red deer in the Austrian Alps, or in the highlands of Asia, of all of which I shall have to speak later. The Scotch stalker is no doubt the best in the world on his own ground, and will bring you up to deer which no stranger could approach, owing to his accurate knowledge of the ground and the wind currents. But unless he knows you well and is a more genial companion than some stalkers I have been out with, he is inclined to resent a man using his own judgment. There are so many stags now in most Highland forests, and so few really worth the trouble to get, that I would rather have a week in a really good Styrian forest during the height of the rutting season than a whole season in the best forest in Scotland.
With Maclachlan as my boatman, I made a long tour in the Hebrides in the summer of 1868. My battalion was quartered at the Tower, a station where there was then no duty but guards, and it was possible to get leave.
