Some years ago, when fishing in Loch Awe, I found a boatman, out of Badenoch, who was a charming companion. It may be the experience of others also that an English keeper usually confines his conversation, at least with strangers, to the business in hand, whereas a Scottish or Highland attendant will talk about Darwinism, Mr. Herbert Spencer, history, legend, psychical research, religion, everything. The boatman had a store of legends, and one day we fell to conversing on the old times, in the Highlands, and the new. He voted for the old. Among the advantages, he mentioned the game; and then, with sparkling eyes, the plunder! Property, of old, had been _les vaches d’autrui_, the cattle of Lowlanders and of other clans. Often, since that day, one has reflected on the old times and the new. The old were not wholly what is supposed. Thus Mr. Mackenzie, in his ‘History of the Camerons,’ contrasts the manly sport of the past with the modern driving up of deer to be shot down by ‘drawing-room’ gunners. Stalking is more common now, but the drawing-room way was the old way! ‘The tenants drive everything before them, while the laird and his friends are waiting with their guns to shoot the deer.’ So writes Burt, between 1726 and 1740. ‘When the chief would have a deer only for his household,’ he does not stalk it himself; ‘the gamekeeper and one or two others are sent into the hills, ... where they often lie night after night to wait an opportunity of providing venison for the family.’[159] I have seen in the Highlands heart-breaking destitution. I have seen an old shivering woman gathering nettles for food near Tobermory. On one side of a river I have seen scantily clad girls hanging about listless, in the rain, beside hovels more like the nests of birds than human habitations. On the other side of the water were comfortable cottages and thriving crops. The former was the Protestant, the latter the Catholic side of the stream, which the Reformation did not cross. In the bleak cold of June, on Haladale, I have said, ‘Who would stay here that could go away?’ The gillie observed that he had been in America, running the blockade, but he vastly preferred Haladale. He numbered his horses and kine; he was a man of substance. But, poverty for poverty, give me nettles and shell-fish in the North, before fried fish (and too little of that) in the New Cut.