WILD SPORT IN BRITTANY. 297 



command of the gunner. As is usual, however, with woodcock 

 on the occasion of hard frost or a heavy fall of snow, great 

 numbers of them, impelled by the strong instinct of self-preserva- 

 tion, migrate at once into lower latitudes, winging their way in 

 the gloom of night to the islands and southern shores of the 

 Mediterranean Sea, where, as many a British soldier knows, they 

 are to be found in great abundance at certain times. While the. 

 snow lasted, our bag averaged twelve couple a day, with a few 

 teal and duck to vary the sport. But every day the cock grew 

 scarcer and scarcer ; and at the end of ten days many a mile of 

 boggy ground might be traversed without flushing a single cock, 

 " the whole fabric of them," as old Cleave, a famous keeper at 

 Tetcott, used to say, "having been destroyed by guns and 

 springles, or gone to a happier land." 



But, as the cock fell off, the wildfowl, duck and teal especially, 

 harassed by the cold blustering winds that followed the snow and 

 gave no rest on the sea-coast, dropped in plentifully insomuch 

 that, unlike a cover, a brook supplying capital sport on one day 

 proved equally productive on the next, every evening and morn- 

 ing bringing in a succession of fresh arrivals from the adjoining 

 sea-shore. Nothing in the way of gunnery, to my mind, could 

 surpass this sport not even cock-shooting, which, to the gunner, 

 is held to be what fox-hunting is to the hunter so attractive were 

 the running streams, and so varying the incidents connected with 

 knocking down and recovering the wounded game. 



About the tenth day after our arrival at the Hermitage, the 

 snow having entirely disappeared, a sharp frost set in ; the wind, 

 from N.E., being " forbiddingly keen " and cutting, and the hill- 

 tops a mass of ice. "This is the very weather for the Scae'r 

 brook," said Shafto, as he drew up the blinds of my bedroom 

 window, and in vain tried to clear away the fretwork of frost that 

 was encrusted on every pane " the upper branch of the stream 



