which they both slept. The Duke lit a candle, opened his door, and went up to his guest, and inquired whether he was suffering any pain? and the latter replied

"Yes, I have got a very bad pain in my trail."

Walter Scott was one of the acquaintances whom Charles Murray made at Hamilton. He left the poem Cadzow Castle as a memento of his visit, little dreaming, perhaps, how famous the whole neighbourhood was to become by his pen.1 Henry Brougham and Chief-Justice Denman are others of note whose names appear.

"It was during one of these visits to Hamilton, Brougham and Denman being both guests at the time, that my uncle asked me to go over to Lanark and show them an establishment that was then making a great sensation in Scotland. I allude to the Educational Institution of the well-known Mr Owen. He was one of those visionary individuals who held that the human mind and human character in childhood were perfectly free from vice of any kind, and that a careful education could mould the youth of both sexes into a state of perpetual innocence. The establishment was upon a large

1 Cambusnethan, in the immediate neighbourhood of Hamilton, is the original of Tillietudlem Castle in 'Old Mortality.' The crowds of tourists who visit it at this day take their tickets, not for Cambusnethan, but for Tillietudlem-perhaps an unrivalled instance of the power of a novelist to influence the prosaic details of railway management.

SPORT IN ARRAN.

49

scale; and the pupils, boys and girls, took their lessons together between the ages of seven and seventeen. Owen was a plausible fellow, and described his system and his course with great volubility to the two distinguished lawyers above mentioned. I watched them during the interview, and I could see that Brougham listened to his explanations with considerable interest, while Denman d―d Mr Owen from the first as a complete humbug. I regret to be obliged to add that a few years later the fact of half-a-dozen of the girl pupils proving enceinte caused Mr Owen to be driven out of the place by the indignant population. I may add that, curiously enough, I found the same charlatan, Owen, in the United States, conducting a school near Philadelphia, but I never heard any more of his success or failure."

Shooting, in the first quarter of the century, had not become the arduous, semi-professional business with which we are familiar; nevertheless, Charles Murray used to bring out his flintlocked "Joe Manton" with as much pride and as much confidence that it was a perfect firearm, as any modern youth can feel in his two or three hammerless breechloaders fitted with ejectors and all the latest improvements. Nowhere had he a finer field for its exercise than in the Isle of Arran, that princely possession of the Dukes of Hamilton, and space must be found for his eulogy on a gamekeeper of the old school :

Ꭰ

"The kennels, which contained somewhere between fifteen and twenty pointers and setters, were under the charge of old George Croll, whom I have always considered the most perfect dogbreaker I ever knew. The greater part of his system of dog-breaking was done in the kennels themselves, which were admirably clean and roomy. The whip seemed to me to be almost unknown in his system, and when he opened the door and entered, the dogs all flocked round him, wagging their tails with joy and affection. But the moment he raised his arm pointing upwards, every dog lay down immediately in the spot where he was, and when he let them out for a run, whether they ran near or far, as soon as he whistled and beckoned, every dog immediately lay down where he was. There was one dog whose remarkable sagacity has remained imprinted indelibly on my memory. It was a small smooth pointer, called 'Peter'; of course it had been exercised with the other dogs along the roads or the sea-shore, but it had never smelt a grouse or been taken out on the hills till the day that George Croll took him out with me to see what he would do. I may mention that rain had been falling and the ground was wet, and consequently most of the birds were on foot. We had scarcely been on the moor five minutes before we saw Peter going very slowly forward and trembling with excitement. George Croll encouraged and patted him, but could hardly get him to advance, and at last he said to me, 'The birds have been here, but they are on foot, and running before us.' With difficulty we persuaded

Peter to go on, his master patting him all the time, and after a few minutes the covey rose, out of shot, before us. This was a very hard trial. We continued our walk over the moor, and then Peter, after a few turns to the right and left in search of a fresh scent, came again to a point; the same thing recurred, the birds were restless, and got up out of shot. Peter seemed to think that the birds were making fools of us, but he went off to the right as fast as possible, described a halfmoon till he got three or four hundred yards in front of us, and then came slowly traversing the ground towards us. Thus, if there were any birds, Peter had got them between him and us, and, sure enough, he had out-manoeuvred the grouse, for he had got them between. They rose and came over my head, and I killed a brace the first grouse that ever had been shot to Peter."

It is vain to sigh for the old leisurely kind of shooting. Men with breechloaders cannot be got to give a dog time to exercise his wits: they walk on without a pause after a shot, and the dogs, which have the same faculties and sagacity as of yore, have no chance of bringing them into play. But it is pleasant to get a glimpse of moorland sport as it was before the days of flurry and big bags.

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CHAPTER III.

1822-1830.

LIFE AT OXFORD.

AFTER leaving Eton in 1822 Charles Murray spent two years at a private tutor's preparing for Oxford. It was to this tutor, the Rev. Mr Hichings, vicar of Sunninghill, that he gratefully ascribed the strong love for the classics which he maintained through life. But the reminiscences which he began to put together in 1892 had been carried little further than his school-days when he died in 1895. A few notes of his life at Sunninghill, a few stories of his college companions, and still fewer of his own doings at Oriel College, Oxford, form the only semblance of a consecutive narrative of the time after he ceased to be an alumnus of the redoubtable Dr Keate at Eton. The only fellow - pupil at Sunninghill of whom