HOUSEBOATS AND HOUSEBOATING. 12] 



will probably close the book with a sigh that the good old days are over, as they are for 

 many parts of the country, though the reappearance of game on what have been considered 

 "shot out" grounds is as well known as it is remarkable. But as China opens up, which she 

 is now doing by leaps and bounds there will in all probability be found more than one 

 game paradise attainable. Even now there is quite sufficient shooting to satisfy the sport 

 who has no desire for massacre or the breaking of records. 



By this time the gentle swish of the water under the bow and along the boat's sides 

 has had its usual effect and bed-ford-shire is hinted at as the first port of call. "Did you 

 say a night cap " ? There is much merit in the suggestion. "Just take a look outside first." 



Crisp and cold after the warmth of the cabin, and Christmas is approaching. The 

 Pleiades are nearly over head. Orion is blazing in all his grandeur. Sirius looks almost as 

 bright as Venus at her best. It is a glorious spectacle. Away in the distance the reflected 

 lights of Shanghai are seen. Good-bye to them. We are bowling along on our way to 

 Kashing. Time was when Kashing was a city in a wilderness. Time was when the city 

 was a wilderness itself. 



Many a man now in Shanghai has shot pheasants and wildfowl within the enclosed area 

 of the city's walls, for in this district the wrath of the Taiping half a century ago was 

 roused to a frenzy. Up to this point he had come, seen and conquered, Caesar's legions 

 not more invincible than he. But at Shanghai and in its neighbourhood he met his match and 

 more, and in his fits of ill-temper he fast out-boxered the Boxers of 1900. Even the tender 

 mercies of the Taiping were cruel : his hate was hell : his vengeance satanic. The country 

 was made, as Isaiah says, " a place for the moles and bats." Humanity ceased to exist, 

 mankind had disappeared. Then was the chance for the fauna of the neighbourhood. 

 Even as recently as ten years ago there were wide tracts of unoccupied land, known to 

 local sportsman as "The Plain," not far from Kashing city. Pheasants got up in bunches 

 of ten or a dozen, partridges were common : nobody paused to look at quail ; snipe and 

 woodcock in their season gave splendid sport, the creeks and ponds teemed with waterfowl, 

 deer were plentiful and further on in the Hangchow country boar could be got without 

 difficulty. Peace, unbroken since the sixties, has erased most of the traces of the rebel's 

 devastations. The furrows which were still visible even in the wildest parts of "The Plain" 

 twenty years ago, though no plough had visited them for a generation, are now once more 

 in tilth. The productive native, innocent of Malthusianism and all its shirks, has repopu- 

 lated the depopulated land, and dispossessed the deer, the boar and the pheasant. But 

 until within recent years the native had but little chance of thinning out wild nature. He 

 might stumble across a pheasant's nest and so destroy a brood, but once the nide was on 

 the wing his efforts were reduced to clumsy trapping. Now (confound him) he shoots for 

 the market, and confound them too and more heartily, still there are actually men of white 

 blood with either yellow or blackened souls who encourage him by buying what he kills 

 in the close season ! 



I am not going to tell where you are to look for your birds. If you don't know from 

 experience, find out for yourself, reading up, if you like, all that Mr. Wade has to say about 

 it, and, if you can find a copy, they are extremely rare now, turn up the corresponding 

 chapters in Groom's Sportsman's Diary. 



