’It’s not a fair question,’ said he. ’Your friend Strang and I are too much of one opinion—ay, on every point we’re agreed—for many’s the long talk we’ve had over the matter.’ ’I know—I know,’ Mr. Hodson said. ’Though I was only half-listening; for when you got to feu-duties and public burdens and things of that kind I lost my reckoning. But you say that you and Strang are agreed as to the proper way of managing a Highland estate: very well: assuming your theories to be correct, is he capable of carrying them out?’ ’I think so—I should say undoubtedly—I don’t think I would myself hesitate about trusting him with such a place—that is, when I had made sufficient inquiries about his character, and got some money guarantee about his stewardship. But then, you see, Mr. Hodson, I’m afraid, if you were to let Strang go his own way in working up an estate, so as to get the most marketable value into it, you and he would have different opinions at the outset. I mean with such an estate as you would find over there,’ he added, indicating with his finger the long stretch of wild and mountainous country they were approaching. ’On rough and hilly land like that, in nine cases out of ten, you may depend on it, it’s foresting that pays.’ ’But that’s settled,’ Mr. Hodson retorted rather sharply. ’I have already told you, and Strang too, that if I buy a place up here I will not have a stag or a hind from end to end of it.’ ’Faith, they’re things easy to get rid of,’ the other said good-naturedly. ’They’ll not elbow you into the ditch if you meet them on the road.’ ’No; I have heard too much. Why, you yourself said that the very name of American stank in the nostrils of the Highlanders.’ ’Can you wonder?’ said Mr. Carmichael quietly: they had been talking the night before of certain notorious doings, on the part of an American lessee, which were provoking much newspaper comment at the time. ’Well, what I say is this—if I buy a place in the Highlands—and no one can compel me to buy it—it is merely a fancy I have had for two or three years back, and I can give it up if I choose—but what I say is, if I do buy a place in the Highlands, I will hold it on such conditions that I shall be able to bring my family to live on it, and that I shall be able to leave it to my boy without shame. I will not associate myself with a system that has wrought such cruelty and tyranny. No; I will not allow a single acre to be forested.’ ’There’s such a quantity of the land good for nothing but deer,’ Mr. Carmichael said, almost plaintively. ’If you only saw it!—you’re going now by what the newspaper writers say—people who never were near a deer-forest in their lives.’