He was a living, a strenuous protest in perpetual kilt against the civilisation, the taming, the softening of mankind. He was essentially wild. His virtues were those of human nature in the rough and unreclaimed, open and unsubdued as the Moor of Rannoch. He was a true autochthon, _terrigena_,--a son of the soil,--as rich in local colour, as rough in the legs, and as hot at the heart, as prompt and hardy, as heathery as a gorcock. Courage, endurance, staunchness, fidelity and warmth of heart, simplicity, and downrightness were his staples; and with them he attained to a power in his own region and among his own people quite singular. The secret of this was his truth and his pluck, his kindliness and his constancy. Other noblemen put on the kilt at the season, and do their best to embrown their smooth knees for six weeks, returning them to trousers and to town; he lived in his kilt all the year long, and often slept soundly in it and his plaid among the brackens; and not sparing himself, he spared none of his men or friends--it was the rigour of the game--it was Devil take the hindmost. Up at all hours, out all day and all night, often without food--with nothing but the unfailing pipe--there he was, stalking the deer in Glen Tilt or across the Gaick moors, or rousing before daybreak the undaunted otter among the alders of the Earn, the Isla, or the Almond; and if in his pursuit, which was fell as any hound’s, he got his hand into the otter’s grip, and had its keen teeth meeting in his palm, he let it have its will till the pack came up,--no flinching, almost as if without the sense of pain. It was this gameness and thoroughness in whatever he was about that charmed his people--charmed his very dogs; and so it should.... But he was not only a great hunter, and an organiser and vitaliser of hunting, he was a great breeder. He lived at home, was himself a farmer, and knew all his farmers and all their men; had lain out at nights on the Badenoch heights with them, and sat in their bothies and smoked with them the familiar pipe. But he also was, as we have said, a thorough breeder, especially of Ayrshire cattle. It was quite touching to see this fierce, restless, intense man--_impiger, acer, iracundus_--at the great Battersea show doating upon and doing everything for his meek-eyed, fine-limbed, sweet-breathed kine.