76 PARTRIDGES 



just finishing breakfast, surrounded by game- 

 keepers and dogs of his own. 



Lord Kennedy gave me a letter he had from 

 Sir Alexander Don, saying he could not ensure 

 him twenty brace of birds at Newton Don, as 

 the corn was all uncut, and advising him to shoot 

 both the days of his match with Coke at Monreith ; 

 in consequence of which he had posted day and 

 night, in order to be here in time for the first 

 appointed day (as well as for the one hundred 

 brace match). I told Lord Kennedy I could not 

 let him go on the ground kept for the one 

 hundred brace match. I went off in search of 

 our gamekeeper. He said, at that hour in the 

 day he could only take him to ground which had 

 been shot over in September, or some which had 

 been driven and disturbed with a view to the one 

 hundred brace match. 



About eleven o'clock Lord Kennedy started, 

 and that day got between forty and fifty brace ; 

 Coke shooting the same day at Holkham ninety- 

 three brace. My father came home in the 

 evening, having been nearly lost in a gale of 

 wind the previous night in his yacht. He wished 

 Lord Kennedy to stay and walk over the ground 

 before the second day of the match ; but he did 

 not, and only returned on the evening before the 

 second day's shooting. 



On that day (the one on which the hundred 

 brace match was to be decided), at 11.30 A.M., 

 when Lord Kennedy stopped to refresh at a farm- 



