Xll OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 



indispensable attribute, great powers of observation, combined with, 

 secondly, an easy, graceful, and gentlemanlike faculty of expressing his 

 ideas, must hare gone far towards making his task feasible (we will not 

 detract from his merits, looking, moreover, at the numbers who have tried 

 and failed in the same line, by saying an easy one) ; but when we add to 

 the other qualifications, thirdly, the power of illustrating by his own spi- 

 rited pencil the most stirring incidents which he has met with in flood and 

 field, possessed by " The Old Shekarry," we may fairly wonder the less at 

 his success. As ia true sportsmanship must be included, as the principal 

 ingredient, humanity, the charge of chronicling butchery, page after page, 

 is disposed of at once ; and as an easy and graceful style of writing pre- 

 supposes a considerable degree of humour and pleasantry, we find matter of 

 fact in this volume quite free from monotony ; and as in the sporting events 

 marked by the finger-post of plates, of which the only complaint can be 

 that they are not more numerous, the interest of every reader must be well 

 supported, especially when the softer feelings are appealed to by such 

 descriptions as that of the death of the hog-hunter's horse, Bidgeley; so 

 in the intermediate spaces — such as the stories of the Scotch Indian, who 

 paves the way to getting the Begum to treat our sportsman with a nautch 

 by dosing her well beforehand with stiff gia-and-water, with aU the 

 attendant incidents of this Caledonian Machiavelli's interview with her 

 highness — the readers, whether sportsmen or not, will be difficult to 

 amuse if they fail to be tickled by such passages as that just referred to. 



Modesty, also another attribute of the real sportsman, shows itself 

 throughout, in the grateful manner in which " H. A. L." acknowledges the 

 services and assistance rendered him by his native attendants, whose 

 attachment to him speaks volumes, both for the kindness which conciliated 

 them, and the good management which kept them up to their ardour and 

 discipline, without his having otherwise to boast of his own deeds to secure 

 these most necessary points for a successful foray against the wild animals 

 of the jungles. 



Another very pleasing feature in this book is the circumstance that, 

 wherever much game was killed at once, it seems to have been, not for the 

 mere purpose of collecting trophies, except in the case of ivory, but for the 

 support of his followers and the native tribes who accompanied them, or 

 for the absolute preservation of hxmian life ; as also the fact that the most 

 noble of beasts — the elephant — can be, by good sTiooting, and a proper 

 knowledge of the point at xcliicli to aim, put to death without the awful can- 

 nonading, and consequently protracted misery to the majestic victim, 

 which less skilful hunters have had to employ, and thus given their readers 

 the painful, though we are heartily glad to find false, impression that it 



