96 PHEASANTS 



The most cursory survey of pheasant 

 shooting in the past would be incomplete 

 without a passing reference to the famous 

 Colonel Peter Hawker. We must all 

 admire — if we do not all wish to emulate 

 — the sportsman who cheerfully enters 

 in his private diary — "breakfasted by 

 candle-light, walked hard all day in a 

 deluge of rain, bagged three cock 

 pheasants ; gloriously out - manoevured 

 all the other shooters, came home very 

 satisfied and dined off one of the birds." 



No day was too wet, no way too long 

 for the gallant colonel, if there was but 

 a chance of sport with the gun. His 

 military career cut short by a wound 

 which lamed him for life, Colonel Hawker 

 gave much of his time to shooting, and 

 his modest diaries are filled with such 

 entries as the following, with a feeling 

 throughout of the real thing — the true 

 spirit of sport. 



Oct. \% 1826— (on the road for Scotland to 

 shoot his first grouse). — On passing the Duke 

 of Newcastle's, on the right going down, the 



