WALKING UP 157 



driving is the exclusive method, who has not had 

 birds shot to him, and been handled well in the pur- 

 suit of wounded game which is difficult to find, as, 

 for example, of partridges in turnips on a bad scent- 

 ing day. One of the most fruitful causes of demorali- 

 sation in retrievers that have only been used to driv- 

 ing is that they have been in the constant habit of 

 seeing dead birds in numbers upon the ground. 

 Where possible the line of guns is always placed in 

 a field of pasture, stubble, or other tolerably bare 

 ground, to facilitate the pick up after the drive, so 

 that by the time a drive is over the dog has, perhaps, 

 six or eight brace of birds within easy view lying 

 quite dead. In the majority of places the retrievers 

 are assigned to under-keepers, mostly under thirty 

 years of age and of limited experience. These are 

 chiefly recruited from one class, that is the sons 

 or relations of older keepers. They are entirely de- 

 pendent for their knowledge upon such instruction as 

 they may have received from the chiefs under whom 

 they have borne arms. But the chiefs themselves are 

 no longer of the generation which studied the break- 

 ing in of dogs as one of the most essential parts of 

 their functions. Modern shooting, with its rearing 

 and watching, its diplomacy, its generalship, and all 

 its elaborate machinery of organisation and detail, 



