102 WARWICK WOODLANDS. 



Halloa ! Tim, bring the rockingham and the tea-chest ; do you 

 hear!" 



"Well, Harry, so you've done the game-bag," exclaimed the 

 other, as he lifted it up and eyed it somewhat superciliously 

 " Well, it is a good one certainly ; but you are the queerest 

 fellow I ever met, to give yourself unnecessary trouble. Here 

 you have been three days about this bag, hard all ; and when 

 it's done, it is not half as good a one as you can buy at Cooper's 

 for a dollar, with all this new-fangled machinery of loops and 

 buttons, and I don't know what." 



" And you, Master Frank," retorted Harry, nothing daunted, 

 " to be a good shot and a good sportsman which, with some 

 few exceptions, I must confess you are are the most culpably 

 and wilfully careless about your appointments I ever met. I 

 don't call a man half a sportsman, who has not every thing he 

 wants at hand for an emergency, at half a minute's notice. Now 

 it so happens that you cannot get, in New York at all, anything 

 like a decent game-bag a little fancy-worked French or Ger- 

 man jigmaree machine you can get anywhere, I grant, that will 

 do well enough for a fellow to carry on his shoulders, who goes 

 out robin-gunning, but nothing for your man to carry, wherein to 

 keep your birds cool, fresh, and unmutilated. Now, these loops 

 and buttons, at which you laugh, will make the difference of a 

 week at least in the bird's keeping, if every hour or so you 

 empty your pockets wherein I take it for granted you put 

 your birds as fast as you bag them smooth down their plum- 

 age gently, stretch their legs out, and hang them by the heads, 

 running the button down close to the neck of each. In this 

 way this bag, which is, as you see, half a yard long, by a quar- 

 ter and a half a quarter deep, made double, one bag of fustian, 

 with a net front, which makes two pockets will carry fifty-one 

 quail or woodcock, no one of them pressing upon, or interfering 

 with, another, and it would carry sixty-eight if I had put ano- 

 ther row of loops in the inner bag ; which I did not, that I 

 might have the bottom vacant to carry a few spare articles, such 

 as a bag of Westley Richards' caps, and a couple of dozen of 

 Ely's cartridges." 



" Oh ! that's all very well," said Frank, " but who the deuce 

 can be at the bore of it ?" 



' Why be at the bore of shooting at all, for that matter ?" 

 replied Harry "I, for one, think that if a thing is worth doing 

 at all, it is worth doing well and I can't bear to kill a hundred 



