Snipe Shooting. 155 



and surveying their proceedings from my coign d'avantage with greats 

 satisfaction until I saw them both out of the bog, when, with a derisive 

 guffaw, I made over the bank and away. 



The chief game which I had to shoot being snipe, I got pretty skilful 

 at last, and have often shot them before I got the gun up to my shoulder. 

 Since those days I have shot snipe in all sorts of places and all over the 

 kingdom, from Cape Wrath pretty nearly to the Lizard. Eor I had several 

 warm days among the snipes and plovers when I was in Caithness years 

 ago, and I commenced my career not half a dozen miles from the Lizard, 

 on the tops of Welsh mountains, and in the bottoms of those valleys, on 

 English marshes, Irish bogs, and along the banks of many a river, even to 

 Battersea fields, where formerly I have killed snipe. I killed a couple once 

 in the Bishop of London's garden at Eulham, to the intense disgust and 

 loudly-expressed objurgation of a stray gardener, as I was sloping off over 

 the fence ; said gardener clearly considering them his own privilege. That 

 was thirty years ago, 



I killed many a couple, too, on the marsh near Southsea Common, most 

 of which is now built over, and I remember that. some years ago I was 

 dining with a friend who lived in one of those very houses, and, conversation 

 turning on the former state of the place, I rather astonished him by saying, 

 " Ah, yes, I remember that the very last snipe I ever shot on the marsh 

 was as near as possible on the spot where you are sitting." 



Of course one hears and reads of those tremendous bags made by parties 

 in Eastern paddy fields and Western swamps ; we have nothing of that kind 

 in this country, though in my youth I have seen the air pretty lively with 

 snipe on the wing. Indeed, I think I may say that I have seen a couple of 

 hundred or so on the wing at once. But somehow when they were so very 

 numerous I never could make as big a bag as I could when I picked up an 

 odd one here and an odd one there, and the wisps were scattered over the 

 country, so that you had to find every bird singly. 



I thoroughly well knew the country, too, and the habits and flights 

 of the snipe, and where they would be under certain circumstances. Wind 

 and weather make all the difference, too, in the lay of snipe. In good 

 moderate open weather you would find the snipe in the moors and bogs. 



