142 A Book of the Snipe, 



the corpse of a snipe for any distance, evi- 

 dently, if well-broken animals, to their great 

 shame and distress. Nothing is more irritat- 

 ing than to watch your dog gingerly carrying 

 a dead bird in the very end of his lips and 

 finally dropping it, perhaps on the far side 

 of an unjumpable dyke. Sir Ralph Payne 

 Gallwey, in his beautiful third volume of 

 * Letters to Young Shooters,' — certainly the 

 most practical and comprehensive work on 

 wildfowl that has appeared since Colonel 

 Hawker's famous volume, — recommends starv- 

 ing a dog thus afflicted '' until he will munch 

 the bones of a snipe for his dinner." It will 

 seldom be necessary to adopt so drastic a 

 measure, as the dislike in most instances soon 

 wears off, and in any case the leg of a cold 

 snipe ^ during the halt for luncheon, proffered 



1 The very best and most manageable luncheon that the 

 shooter can take out. The birds should be a little over- 

 cooked, and eaten with brown bread and butter dusted with 

 a little pepper and salt. To those who, like the writer, cannot 

 " abide " sandwiches, two jack-snipe thus prepared will make 

 the midday meal a thing to look forward to, even on a wet day 

 in the middle of a bog. For drink, a flask of claret : spirits 

 are clammy on the marshes. 



