A FOREST SCENE. 333 



reached the woods beyond, I secreted myself in the limbs 

 of a fallen tree, some of the bare points of which were 

 submerged in the muddy water. By the time I had 

 reached this my first ambush for fowl, the ducks and teal 

 were still unsettled from the effects of my shot, and they 

 kept on wheeling round either in large or small flocks or 

 in pairs. A long but ineffectual shot at some wild geese 

 alarmed them again, and then I had five long single shots 

 at common duck, blue teal, and common teal, and Brutus 

 brought them all to bag. A whistle then brought George 

 to me, when sending him back with the fowl, I told him 

 to order Tom to take his gun and go up the contrary side 

 of the lake, to disturb the fowl from that side, to kill 

 what he could, and to keep at it all day. Having given 

 this order, George was, towards the afternoon, to follow 

 me up the lake, and, keeping out of sight, by his ear to 

 maintain himself within reach of a signal- whistle, in order 

 to come up and carry home the spoil. 



All this being arranged, I proceeded on through the 

 wild forest very far up the lake, the fowl by this time having 

 congregated in immense numbers. What a lovely, still, 

 and sunny day it was for such a splendid prospect of sport, 

 though the weather itself for that peculiar pursuit was 

 unfavourable. The woods were so lonely, so ruinously 

 grand, and so wildly beautiful in their picturesque decay, 

 so hushed and so remote from man ! It took me not long 

 to discover that the lake was infinitely too extensive for 

 me to do much with the fowl, for it could not have been 

 less than two miles in length, and in some parts more than 

 half a mile in breadth, the trees which fringed it having 

 in many places fallen into its waters. Far from as well 

 as near to the margin of its strand there looked up from 

 beneath the surface the arms and points of old snags that 



