232 LETTERS TO YOUNG SHOOTERS LETTER 



impossible to make a bag by yourself, or show sport 

 to your friends. 



2nd. To kill the old birds with a view to leaving a 

 preponderance of young ones for nesting the following 

 spring, as well as to break up and disperse the coveys, 

 and thus prevent their inter-breeding, and the conse- 

 quent production of weak chicks and sn~all hatchings. 



3rd. To give sport to a number of friends, as a 

 moderate bag of partridges killed during a day's 

 ' driving ' in late October or in November are worth, 

 in the style of shots they afford, thrice the number 

 mopped up in a high field of turnips in September. 

 Six or seven guns can partake in a partridge drive, 

 when did as many walk the fields, supposing the 

 birds lie to the gun, very few might escape, and these 

 in main part probably the old ones. 



4th. As a capital means of obtaining pheasants 

 that have strayed from the coverts. A cock pheasant 

 flushed by the drivers, perhaps a quarter-mile from 

 the guns, when partridges are being driven, offers, I 

 think, the most perfect rocketing shot imaginable, as, 

 en route to the wood he belongs to, he mounts higher 

 and higher into the sky to avoid the danger he is 

 aware lurks beneath him. 



Partridge driving can be practised on any ordinary 

 estate that is fairly level, and does not contain very 

 small fields ; and I will presently endeavour to show 



