THE ADVERTISER

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

16 January 1916

(page 9)

THE LAST WILD HAGGIS.

St. Andrew’s Day has left the usual trail of Scottish stories in its wake. Most of them are venerable; a few of them are new; and one of them is an annual. It is the special property of the aristocratic but entertaining gossip-writer of the “Sunday Graphic,” the Marquess of Donegall, and relates to an eminent Swiss professor, at whose home in Zurich there is displayed on a wall “a head looking suspiciously like that of Mr. Ghandi’s goat.” Underneath, engraved on a brass plate, is the inscription: “The last wild haggis to be shot in Scotland, Jan., 1902.” “It was just one of Alastair [sic] Crowley’s jokes,” Lord Donegall explains. He happened at this time to be calling himself Lord Boleskin [sic], and playing the Scottish laird. One morning at breakfast a gillie rushed in, excited, ‘A haggis on the. hills, m’lord!’ he cried. With that, Crowley and the Swiss scientist rushed out and shot a very old goat; which Crowley had had tethered in a suitable place. No one has ever dared disillusion the Swiss scientist.” But what if he should so far relax from scientific pursuits as to read the London Sunday papers? And in any case, as somebody (a Southron, no doubt) remarked when told that a haggis had been shot, “Shooting was too good for it.”