8 A Book of the Snipe. 



it with a charge of shot, or vice versa because 

 its flight or gait renders it a prey to a possibly 

 limited amount of skill. It may be for a 

 hundred other reasons ; but the fact remains 

 that nearly every lover of the gun, and the 

 sport it brings, loves to swing it on to the 

 departing form of one or other of the delight- 

 ful beings included in the term ''game " above 

 any of the rest. 



I do not at all mean to say that the 

 pleasure in every sort of shooting is less 

 because we may have a shooting protdgd (if 

 that can be called a protdge in the destruc- 

 tion of which we are chiefly interested) ; it 

 is only that in the pursuit of the instinctively 

 selected quarry it is more. There is pleasure 

 in every fair method of bringing game to 

 hand with a gun, and very often even the 

 specialist is forced to confess that he has had 

 ecstatic moments in quite other branches of 

 shooting that made him forget his specialism. 



That wild quarter of an hour at the 

 bottom of the coombe in the covert, for 

 instance, when H., who thought himself im- 



