594 DUCK SHOOTING. 



ostensibly to catch fish, and the ducks, diving, become 

 entangled in their meshes, and drown. Laws exist in 

 certain States forbidding the setting of nets for the 

 purpose of catching ducks, but as no method has as yet 

 been discovered for exposing what goes on in a man's 

 brain, it has never been possible to prove that any indi- 

 vidual set his nets for the purpose of catching ducks, 

 and no convictions under this law have ever been had. 

 Of late years there has been little or no complaint of 

 this practice. 



SIZE OF BAGS. 



The man who shoots merely as a matter of recrea- 

 tion usually has great — and sometimes just — com- 

 plaint to make of the market-shooter. Many men de- 

 clare that if there were no shooting for the market, 

 game would be as plenty as ever. The average gunner 

 looks with disfavor on the man who turns the fruits of 

 his shooting into money, and attributes the diminished 

 number of our fowl very largely to the slaughter which 

 he causes. 



As a matter of fact, it is hard to see where the mar- 

 ket-shooter is any more to blame for the destruction 

 of birds than is he who shoots merely for recreation. 

 The market-shooter, to be sure, is a professional, in 

 the sense that he turns his skill in a branch of sport 

 into money. But in this there is nothing necessarily 

 disgraceful, and we have known more than one mar- 



