46 CONVERSATIONAL HINTS 



sails on, unconscious of a reverse, with a sort of 

 smiling persistence, down the stream of modified 

 untruth fulness, of which nobody ought to know 

 better than Flickers the rapids, and shallows, and 

 rocks on which the mariner's bark is apt to go to 

 wreck. What is there in the pursuit of sport, I 

 ask myself, that brings on this strange tendency 

 to exaggeration ? How few escape it. The excel- 

 lent, the prosaic Dubson, that broad-shouldered, 

 whiskered, and eminently snub-nosed Nimrod, he, 

 too, gives way occasionally. Flickers's, I own, is 

 an extreme case. He has indulged himself in fibs 

 to such an extent that fibs are now as necessary 

 to him as drams to the drunkard. But Dubson 

 the respectable, Dubson the dull, Dubson the un- 

 romantic why does the gadfly sting him too, and 

 impel him now and then to wonderful antics. For 

 was it not Dubson who told me, only a week ago, 

 that he had shot three partridges stone dead with 

 one shot, and in measuring the distance, had found 

 it to be 100 yards less two inches ? Candidly, I 

 do not believe him ; but naturally enough, I was 

 not going to be outdone, and I promptly returned 

 on him with my well-known anecdote about the 

 shot which ricocheted from a driven bird in front 



