I IMU MM 



HO does not recollect his first pheasant? I don't 

 mean the first he bags, but the first he shoots at, 

 because nine times in ten he contrives to score a 

 miss, or he bags half of a tail feather, or something 

 of that sort. To an unaccustomed gunner, or one 

 who has previously only seen small game, the rise 

 of an old cock pheasant is something prodigious. 

 He shines so, he makes such a row, and vanishes 

 from your gaze so speedily as you look after 

 him, that it produces very much the effect which 

 it did upon old Briggs when he flushed one for 

 the first time, namely, a sort of sensation as if an 

 ornithological Catherine-wheel had combusted almost 

 The ordinary observer, who sees pheasants get up and 

 fly away, wonders how you could possibly miss such a great big lumbering 

 bird as that; but put the ordinary observer in a corner where the trees 

 are pretty close, or in a narrow ride with a five or six years' growth 

 on it, and with a lot of strong, wild, rocketting pheasants processing 

 to and fro overhead and around, and he will wonder no longer, unless 

 he changes round, and begins to wonder how you can hit them. There 



under his nose. 



