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merry days of rifle-shooting, when the meeting was 

 half-picnic, half-business ; when Jenny Lind came down 

 to sing in camp, and riflemen vied with one another 

 in making their tents as smart as Henley house-boats. 

 Sunday at Wimbledon was quite a Society function, 

 and I recall with a sigh those cunningly mixed iced 

 drinks which Jennison used to supply dreams of cool, 

 delicious suction! And then those lovely barmaids of 

 Spiers and Pond's, who were marched off every evening 

 under the escort of a phalanx of stalwart policemen 

 to the adjacent farmhouse where they slept a bevy 

 of picked beauties whom Kneller and Lely and Romney 

 would have given worlds to immortalise on canvas ! 

 Such were the frivolous surroundings of the great rifle 

 meeting in those early days! No doubt it was all 

 wrong. We ought to have taken our shooting more 

 seriously ; we should have striven to make the camp 

 a model of Spartan simplicity ; we should have put 

 ourselves under the sternest military discipline. But 

 we didn't. And I think, perhaps, it was as well that 

 we did not. For, after all, the great object was 

 to make the meeting a popular institution, to hold 

 out as many attractions as possible to the citizen- 

 soldier, and to lead him by flowery paths to the goal 

 of duty. That object once attained, then away with 

 all these trivial, fond concomitants ; let us go in for 

 rifle-shooting pure and simple, sternly stripped of all 

 meretricious allurements. But don't let us expect the 

 young citizen-soldier of to-day to be more of a Spartan 

 than we were at his age. 



A not less revered name among British marksmen, 



