COUNTRY LIFE
Scotland at its Best Seldom has the charm of Scotland filled its immigrants with greater zeal than in this year when the north has excelled the south in congenial weather. It has known no drought. Perhaps' the sportsmen have been most enthusiastic. - The red grouse, the one bird that is quite peculiar to Britain, has flourished beyond the normal ; not that the numbers were excessive (one hopes they never will be), but the birds were as healthy as their native air is wholesome. The heather-clothed hills were made more than usually romantic by both the fairness and the freaks of the weather. In. the spiing while visiting Palestine, I was astonished to discover that the Dead Sea was being advertised as one of the greatest of health resorts because it was 1,200 feet below sea level and the air endowed with more than its proper share of oxygen and ozone ! It is indeed a salubrious spot ; but one may be excused for having a preference for 1,200 feet above sea level, for lochs full of fish, for the eagle instead of the raven, though perhaps it ought to be conceded that the sea of Tiberias is full of most edible little fish and the partridges are numerous at Jericho. The health of the grouse is, we may hope, not only an accident of the season. Since Wilson discovered the worst disease of the species and more light has been thrown on its feeding habits, the grouse are given their optimum of conditions on a greater number of moors. The heather and the grouse flourish together as surely almost as the great copper butterfly and the great water dock ; and after all, in spite of the interval, when it is first destroyed, belts of young heather have an aesthetic attraction of their own. That normal migration of sportsmen to Scotland was followed by a migration of men of science, of whom a number, it is said, pursued bigger game than grouse or salmon on the shores of Loch Ness. They too returned lyrical on the beauty of the land.
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