WINTER FERRETING 317 



in the sport, and the more sober-minded retrievers who 

 form the reserve. Hardly a breath of air is stirring : 

 you may almost hear the flutter to the earth of a 

 withered leaf, and so everything is in your favour. 

 And there is something in such commonplace or vulgar 

 amusements as rabbiting and rat-hunting that recom- 

 mends itself to the vagrant instincts of humanity. For 

 ourselves, we have ferreted in all manner of circum- 

 stances, from wheat-stacks and tottering barns up- 

 wards. In the mounds under the gnarled boughs of 

 the oaks and thorns in a venerable park, where the 

 rabbits burrowed amicably in the hollow stems among 

 the jackdaws. We have shot on the face of a brae 

 sloping to a precipice dipping sheer into a lake, where 

 each rabbit, as he was rolled over, crumpled into a ball, 

 and pitching over the brink was picked up by a boat- 

 man in waiting ; in the dikes dividing fields in the 

 northern Scotch counties, where the piles of loose 

 granite that had been cleared off the land were honey- 

 combed by labyrinths of galleries where ferrets had 

 to be sent in by the half-dozen to cut the lines of 

 communication, and whence the inmates would scuttle 

 at intervals like the fragments of a bursting shell. 

 And of course we have ferreted in all weathers. But 

 to our fancy, as we said, the pleasantest form of the 

 sport is in the perfect stillness and purity of the clear 

 winter day, in the banks and hedgerows of a richly 

 wooded Lowland country. It is a very fair match, on 

 the whole, between the guns and the rabbits. Scene 

 for example under the skeleton canopy of a spreading 



