472 Notes on Sport and Travel ix 



the trout I bagged : an agreement which was 

 carried out satisfactorily to both parties, by sending 

 the haus-mddchen up to the great hotel every 

 evening with the contents of my creel ; and the 

 ' happy return ' was duly handed over to my stout 

 friend, to his unmitigated satisfaction. 



Indeed, so delighted was he with the bright silver 

 gulden I managed to extract from his stream, — 

 in which he himself was wont to popjoy in a very 

 aboriginal manner — that one fine day he invited 

 me to join in a great shooting -expedition he had 

 organised over a manor on which he had the 

 right of sporting, and (as I found out afterwards) 

 over certain other manors on which he had 7iot 

 that same ; in short, to take my pastime with 

 others, as far as we could without being stopped. 

 As it fell out, we were not stopped, which made me 

 suspect that sundry semi - military foresters had 

 received a quiet hint that good wine might be had 

 literally for a song, not a hundred miles from my 

 worthy entertainer's wirtJischaft. 



Hoping and expecting not so much sport as 

 fun and novelty, I borrowed a gun, — a regular pop- 

 gun, good enough at twenty-five yards in a gun- 

 maker's yard, but of very little use in the field — 

 locks infamous, of course ; laid in a mighty stock 

 of powder and shot, the grains of one nearly as 

 large as those of the other ; and retired for the 

 night, as the novels say. 



Some time before daylight I was aroused by 



