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Updated: May 17, 2025
The faintest hint of such a terrible eventuality made his heart dissolve within him; he would agree to anything he would cut short his grouse-shooting he would make a speech in the House of Lords, he would even overrule Dr. Andrew Smith rather than that.
His aunt who could have imagined such a thing? idolises him, and the young girls of the neighbourhood are falling in love with him.... Many of her old friends have given up going to Tatyana Borissovna's. I have a neighbour, a young landowner and a young sportsman. One fine July morning I rode over to him with a proposition that we should go out grouse-shooting together. He agreed.
The Ayrshire grouse-shooting is not the best in Scotland; but there is grouse-shooting in Ayrshire; and the shooting on the Portray mountains is not the worst shooting in the county. The castle at Portray overhangs the sea, but there is a wild district attached to it stretching far back inland, in regard to which Lizzie Eustace was very proud of talking of "her shooting."
It might be possible that she would never speak to him again; that all the pleasures and ambitious hopes to which she had introduced him might be over as soon as that rash word should have been spoken! But, nevertheless, he would speak it. On this day there was to be a grouse-shooting party, and the shooters were to be out early.
Being an early riser, and indisposed to remain idle till breakfast time, he was found in the morning knitting an immense woollen stocking, which he afterwards took into use, and found most comfortable wear for grouse-shooting, as he took care to inform me.
With him all months were, we may say, idle months; but, as a rule, August was of all the most idle. Sometimes he would affect to shoot grouse, but hunting, not grouse-shooting, was his passion as a sportsman. He would leave London, and spend perhaps a couple of days with Mr. Horsball looking at the nags.
And by the same token one could not imagine him expert at billiards, or at grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at which what are called successful men commonly divert themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in almost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats.
George Hotspur was at this time something under thirty years of age, and the Earl was four years his senior. The Earl was a married man, with a family, a wife who also liked poor George, an enormous income, and a place in Scotland at which George always spent the three first weeks of grouse-shooting. The Earl was a kindly, good-humoured, liberal, but yet hard man of the world.
He had done considerable grouse-shooting and had developed a little too much skill in that particular line. To paraphrase Herbert Spencer, to shoot fairly well is a manly accomplishment, but to shoot too well is evidence of an ill-spent youth. Doctor Darwin was having fears that his son was going to be an idle sportsman, and he was urging the divinity-school.
Now that American field sports are wilder in one sense, I grant readily; with the exception of snipe-shooting here, and grouse-shooting in Scotland, the former being tamer, in all senses, than any English the latter wilder in all senses than any American field-sport.
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